Shadow
The story of a timid Dratini, caught as a Game Corner prize, who finds the perfect human trainer and, to his great distress, falls in love with her.

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Thumbnail art by kenket, used with permission
Audio DOES NOT COMPLETELY MATCH the text (something like a 1-2% difference) as it represents the fifth draft or so, whereas the final text is the sixth or seventh. Probably won't be a problem after Chapter 5 ...


___ Level 25 [continued] ___

This was a store for clothing, a boutique, she said, laying him on a white sofa. He could help, she said, and give his opinion on something to wear for the beach. So she looked and chose something. And what good, he thought, was a wretch like him to her at all? so sick he could not look at her in a parted outfit, purely practical for humans in the water, without thinking of all the skin under the shirt he’d pressed against; quite as smooth as a Dratini’s, never lost a bit to peeling; quite as soft; not as tall as he was long but enough to curl up on and fit his nose below her chin. He blushed; he turned away. She said it was perhaps too open, would look for one in one piece. In any case all four limbs would be bare, and floating in the water she might hold him with every—no! He pressed his face into the corner. He was losing his mind. For didn’t he imagine her now laying on the beach and he above her, both hands on his neck, and not a bit of skin removed from hers? Were there any psychics about, the minder’s, perhaps, who saw? Perhaps if he thought wrongly it became their duty to interrupt and save her, tear him away. —What do you think? she said. A shirt and shorts—yes, he nodded. She ought to choose what she liked and hang him, but so long as she asked … She picked him up and held him at the mirror, as if to see how they looked together, as if she chose it to match. He shouldn’t blush to see himself, she said; he was perfectly healthy and adorable. How quickly she would fling him away in disgust if she knew! The cashier lady would cry out for help, getting in between them (she smiled as Runa paid; a rich girl, she must think, and her spoiled Dratini, not a battler, summer weeks on holiday)—the Arcanine crushing him on the ground until Runa tore out the hidden ball and called a Jenny. All it took was one touch, something unmistakable (he watched her mouth as she spoke), and it would all end at once, as was bound to happen eventually. For however much people looked pleasant now, he thought, as Runa put the bag around her shoulder and took him in both arms again, all these affectations, he knew if they ever found out all these people would at once turn and destroy him, their Pokémon helping. Just as behind bright streets and corners there were people living roughly, and under the pretty forests and lakes Pokémon scrapped for food and shelter, so too in society itself there were recesses, unspoken-of strictures, which if broken made one an enemy to every right-thinking human and her Pokémon at once, not for the breach itself—to kiss a human—but for the lost impression, that for a Pokémon to curl up in his human’s arms was no longer innocent but perhaps a sign of something. This was a change unbearable, they all felt, or wouldn’t everyone in the world have to worry and check themselves? But as Runa recalled a song, something from the Kimono dance chorus, and (his head against her, feeling it through him) breaking from a steady hum she sang,

Legends born eternally,
Nature never changing—

suppose, he thought, he never changed? For so long as he trained he would grow and perhaps evolve, but evolution did not change everything (which would be horrible in itself, not the same person). One’s character may change—a Charizard, say, once a sweet Charmander, turned rough and hard because of all the strength—but that wasn’t necessary, really more the exception than the regular case. Could such sickness really grow with evolution? Surely if that happened there would be a sign, if there were others like him: large Pokémon ravishing their trainers left and right, on all the papers and screens. Was that proof it didn’t get stronger? Perhaps it only proved he was alone; certainly it wasn’t a natural thing, to feel this way for the other kind. There were legends—that was where he got it from, the tone of the report—old myths of Pokémon appearing as human, and somehow even breeding. How did it work? Suppose he slept beside Runa, some warm gesture on her part, and in the morning there was an egg—some sort of abomination, Runa asking how it was possible, how it worked without a special bond, finding everything out. But that was impossible; and, they were legends, nothing to do with the city and the beach. So he felt the sea air; the lilac; the warmth of her skin up his side. There was no risk of that, he thought, was there?

Runa said they might sit until it was time (hours already with her!), and they went into a little restaurant, found a booth with a window overlooking the waterfront across the cobbled square—still a few people, though not quite the crush of summer, not even like Ecruteak when the trees were all pink and they were only getting ready for the carnival. Runa ordered fruit and shakes, and they arrived on two little dishes: slices of apple and mango, a nest of berries, a whole pitaya.

“It’s also called a dragon fruit,” she said, and smiled. He would like it, she said—sweet but very mild, very healthy.

There was something in the peeling of a pitaya, how she made a little space and then, like that, the whole skin popped off, that filled him with a sense of peace, a cosiness, as though an old sticky layer had shed. This was enough, he thought; if all the rest came to nothing, if he never grew closer, this was enough with Runa. She liked his company; hadn’t said a word about battling; only cared that he was happy, the sort of simple thing that stress of training, if anything, disrupted. Probably to enter battling at all wasn’t necessary, Runa being warm even to Rita who did nothing. A conversation was enough, even if he could not speak, just to see her talk, look at him, smile because he listened.

“I’m sorry if buying things was dull,” she said.

It was an odd thing, this need to put on clothing—humans having less in the way of warmth and resistance than Pokémon, for whatever reason evolved, they said, unable to bear natural temperatures. (Gaia always said he was unusual, hardly felt cold or heat at all, except, he thought, in connection with Runa.) And so, as humans did, they made an asset of it; took action, took to engineering their world in a way no other species did to accommodate. There wasn’t a species more adaptive in the world; Pokémon were clever, yes, might have arms and cleverness fit to change the world around them, yet in all the thousands of years they hadn’t put together a civilisation, as humans had: a human in a crowd of wilders, he thought, was its rightest head. Of course the others never understood, as he tried to explain it, how marvellous they were—thought it was only a bright trainer he wanted, said, when he kept stressing it (not as self-understanding then, not as practised), that he was odd, a wilder enamoured by civilisation. So he was: he loved all the human works, the music, the clothing too, the dance—like a Dragonair’s motion, he reasoned—the capacity of all to stand up and decide their fate. A wilder only adhered to the wilds, and so amounted to little; a battler only drove up a ladder; whereas humans produced works so great that whole worlds popped up inside them and—like that—another world for Pokémon, the battling industry, was born, a little part of theirs.

“Manda will probably make champion this year,” Runa said. Of course that was easy, he thought, with such advantages: the heir, older than Runa by six years, no hesitations at all in using Pokémon. “Remember the Indigo Plateau Conference opens today. That’s probably why it’s so quiet—there’s no screen here.”

Nor in the hotel room, he thought. Why weren’t they watching themselves, all laid around her to study the battles, support her sister?

Runa stirred the little black pitaya seeds in her juice, but didn’t drink it. “I don’t like the tournaments,” she said. “I mean, a friendly contest is fine. But these days you don’t reach the top unless you’re all about winning and hard drills—like my sister. There’s, um … there’s a word they use for certain styles of training. Pondelorian.” She looked at him. “It means a mathematical approach, where you spend a lot of money and do a lot of repetitive training to get the best possible performances from Pokémon. Friendship and happiness being secondary.”

It was personal to her, he thought, that she had to share the name, none of her family caring, perhaps, for Pokémon as much as she did. But what she said was the case a long time, wasn’t it? The show talked about the champion Red as the last of an era, and Red was—how old?—at least forty, and quit the title when he was younger than Runa.

“Of course, her Pokémon turned out fine!” she said. She put her hand on the table. “Some day you’ll meet them and make friends. I hope they win … Maybe we’ll watch the finals. They’ve been grinding so long everyone says she can’t lose against Lance. I just don’t like people building up the contest and forgetting what battling’s about—growing Pokémon. Manda never got that.”

Not that blood ought to matter, he thought, but it was odd that, for all the warmth Runa gave Pokémon, she kept it from her own human family. With Pokémon of similar types, two Dratini say, one couldn’t deny there was a shared understanding, one not only for the Corner, that made them rather closer—oughtn’t it be so for humans growing up together? But her people, Runa would say, being so rich, were not like other humans and didn’t understand. They treated Pokémon as a resource, cared for yet kept apart; bred them scientifically; valued them for things like shininess when in uniquity and worth (how he fluttered as she said it!) he was no different from Gaia.

“I’m sorry,” she said—“I shouldn’t say bad things about family. I mean, we do communicate. They pay for everything—we couldn’t travel like this on just the trainer’s stipend. But—” There was a drop of juice running down his neck, and she reached over with a tissue. “I mean, this is nice, relaxing a bit after travelling like other trainers, but they’re used to a totally different lifestyle. Maybe Tanwen’s told you about it … what she saw wasn’t the same, though, in the nurseries. You could visit, but … I mean it’s not the sort of place a Pokémon can grow up properly. But I mean, if you really preferred it …”

And as she looked down and held her shake, did she think—? Or was she asking if he would leave her then, only break off and live in comfort free of fear, done with battling? As if he would abandon Runa just to lay out on a pillow watching a screen, to take up another cage! He laid his head on the table.

She smiled and said, “Oh, I didn’t mean you, Shadow,” and taking the straw she held the tip so that the mango and pitaya crush stayed in and held it out for him to lick. (She would not even clean it after: that was Runa with Pokémon.) Rita, she meant, would flee given half a better shot at luxury—or was that true? There were times Tanwen looked at her she seemed to frown, that he saw her watch a battle and tread. Once she asked him how he found it, to battle the first time; turned it into a barb right after, as she did, an O, perhaps it’s not for you, but still there was the question. Was she beginning to think more of Runa? Time would see what happened with her, Gaia said, but already she was two months with them without offering a use—that at least Tanwen allowed him now. There hadn’t yet been another Pokémon who approached Runa and became the team’s sixth; it was only fit, then, if it was Rita all along.

“Things don’t usually change without an outside force,” she said, stirring the seeds until they twirled. “If you spend too much time without pressure … you might stop pushing back. And that’s a waste of a life, don’t you think, when it goes on for years and years? Back home, Pokémon don’t have a chance to be themselves—I mean, all society says it’s not up to them to have a choice. But most people don’t grow up well unless someone guides them. They never try to change their nature because they don’t know it’s possible. No, you’re lucky, Shadow,”—she moved the berry dish closer and smiled—“you already know that!”

And like some rot who didn’t even hear her words, wasn’t affected at all, he could only pick out another pecha berry and chew. If Runa had one flaw, it was that her quality blinded her to others, whom she assumed to be like her; fundamentally capable of similar understanding; able to observe their own character which, being only a simple portrait of connections and contingent qualities (so she described the game of Voltorb Flip, just arithmetic and logic and probabilities), may be redesigned at will. Was that genius? he thought. He was no longer certain. Anyone can grow, she said; anyone can improve. (But one was born with a thing like genius, surely—one didn’t grow into that!) But if as she said nature changed, nothing yet was certain: he may yet gain a power, not flush every time she looked at him, not feel his flares and skin grow hot. Oh, he thought, let it be as simple as that—let it be a thing that just washed away! (Evolution was the key.) The sickness needn’t even go, not entirely, so long as he could make it harmless. And then there would be nothing to spoil it, with Runa in the sea, swimming right beside her as she—

“I’m sorry,” Runa said, standing and starting for the door: outside Rita ran by with a silk scarf in her mouth, then a young trainer and his Eevee chasing after, and then the girl minder and the boy and the Arcanine.

[chapter continues in next part]