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

Level 30 [continued]

He wouldn’t stay. He looked: the watch was covered by Dyna’s towel. “[What time is it?]” he said.

Dyna picked up the watch and said, “[Uh—]”

“[It’s three twenty,]” Rita said.

Runa would finish at four, return for a long evening with all of them. He rolled off the chair—too long laying out, being lazy (he might have exercised all the time). “[I’m going to wait at the gym,]” he said.

“[Oh, what a surprise,]” Tanwen said, turning and whistling—so rude, he thought, treating the minders like that! (It brought shame on Runa.) The boy put down his book and looked; the Arcanine started forward. And it wasn’t necessary—no one would try and steal him only going through the city—but the minders insisted.

And hang what the others thought! He folded the cloth over the apple on the table and took the corners in his mouth. He would bring her an apple, that she knew he thought of her.

The Arcanine said, “[To the gym?]”

He was sorry for the whistle, he said, speaking carefully around the cloth. It wasn’t his fault, she said. (Then they did think it shameful, he thought.) Would he rather hold on? But he needed the stretch. They went on into the city.

Runa’s scarf, he thought … how he nearly died! For a moment he imagined her only saying that he was in love—he didn’t wrap round her that often, did he?—plant the idea if it wasn’t already in the others’ minds. He couldn’t hide adoring her, but to love? Apart from Torus that had to be a secret. Tan was only feeling sore, saying things. She hadn’t evolved for eight months; Gaia evolved in three, and dragons, they said, took ages for it, as they lived so long. That was the cause of it, that picture in the paper: Runa and her Dragonair, Gaia being, in the view of every stranger, first in the team, far more than some Quilava they didn’t know. And Torus rose quickly now that he really participated, and Dyna too was very powerful; so Tanwen, who always thought herself number one, had to feel sick that she was fighting for anything from second to fourth, only him quite inferior. So she felt her influence waning, and the injustice felt intolerable; so she grew apart, caused friction in the team. How could anyone harm Runa when she wanted nothing but to help? It was absurd; it was like a Voltorb self-destructing! But suppose Tanwen left, and Rita as well?

(The Arcanine went around him, between the cars along the crossing.)

Suppose Dyna left. If Runa knew she never liked battling she would insist she stop and didn’t put herself through it for her sake. But then what did it mean for Runa if half the team abandoned her? What did it mean for her approach? It would appear as if Pokémon didn’t care for dreaming; it suggested they didn’t amount to anything without direction. Would she doubt herself, then, her philosophy? Not that, he thought—a thing she proved and reasoned after all, with Torus’s endorsement. And besides, he thought, moving out along the crossing beside the Arcanine, all the people looking, keeping behind her legs—besides, it was only an invention of his nerves. He always saw the worst in things, Gaia said, and so he was always afraid. It was a matter of perspective, having a sense of proportion. Whereas all the great humans had such understanding, and hence a sticking power: Runa would persevere.

But the city (leave all that) was really incredible! What had been a bare beach, hardly more than sand and a few trees and a valley, now became by human hands Cianwood City, a resort anyone may come to visit (so they did in summer, more than even Olivine). So humans could do: take a place that was home to only wilders and—though others pointed to that like a criticism, taking away the long grasses and habitats, forgetting the Safari Zone covering much of the island, even spreading ten years ago to a new reserve at Mount Silver—taking all that and replacing it with shelter for many times their number of Pokémon as well as humans; forming a thousand new lives and families; giving all a thorough life, in advanced conditions.

Take that street, he thought (he looked through the Arcanine’s legs). Runa took them down it one evening after training, and they saw a café, a restaurant, a residential block itself with many whole families, a Pokémon Mart, and a dozen other places he could not recall—that, one street. There were hundreds in the city; thousands in Goldenrod, in Saffron, in Castelia of Unova, the great metropolis: hundreds of cities: a hundred thousand streets: tens of millions of humans and Pokémon living together. And every one of them—that street, the old man who played a song for Runa on his stringed instrument, the Skitties in the café, the passing trainer who looked, the nurse and the Chansey carrying boxes to the clinic—every street had that again, all the stories multiplied a million times. Whereas in the wilds, it would be a flock of Pidgeotto, a hive of Beedrill, a rotten, pecked-at orchard: that’s what wilders produced.

There was something in humans (so must be the case, the only way to explain it) that drove them to expand and adapt, to fit the environment to the one or the one to it, or both: all things adapted, all efforts taken. So the Cianwoodite, or was it Cianwooder? acted just the same, and every human in the world had that ability: adaptation: engineering: the universal talent of humankind.

It was not, he said, as if his attraction was all in rotten taste; disturbed he may be, but it was not entirely outside reason. Humans were simply the extraordinary species of the world, the one ahead of any form of Pokémon, lacking their energies but also limitations, gaining powers not by evolution but through their own will. Humans could not control energy, could not generate it from nothing like a Pokémon; so they invented a method, technology. Humans did not do well in the wilds; in civilisation, they lived better than any wilder. They created whole societies, worlds of science and art and culture, formed collective enterprises, institutions, all affairs of organisation better than any Pokémon could conceive, surpassing by—what was the term? a multiplicity? An order of magnitude. Nothing Pokémon had done compared: in thousands of years, even with their abilities, even with Alakazam and legendaries throughout, there was nothing, not a trace of civilisation; no clawed-out pictures in a cave or scrap of writing; no pot or tool as in those old burial sites (the other side, the Arcanine said, so they wouldn’t stare) from the programme on lost civilisations. Something set humans apart, some trait Runa herself did not admit. The urge to adapt, to build … to architect? he thought. Whatever it was, humans did it naturally, and Pokémon did not; hence society in one and not the other. So was it outrageous, if yet unnatural, was it absurd and obscene if he only felt more for them than Pokémon? than some other Dratini in a cave? Pokémon were, by most standards, fixed: they evolved along set paths; whereas humans lacked any bounds at all, and yet were so elegant! so ordered in their creations! Structures set up and folded before them, constrained to no set moves or methods. A dancer on a stage; a bronze-skinned girl playing Flip, he thought. Was it possible Runa changed the world? No Pokémon had such power, none but the legendaries who, if they did anything, did it broadly and without finesse or order. But any human could ascend to greatness in society; one could affect the many, turn over a million lives for the better, or the one; and that to humans was to evolve, to become something greater than any Pokémon by far.

(“[Mind that,]” the Arcanine said. The van passed ahead.)

Take language, for instance (the van advertised a Better Kanji class): language was the finest case. Humans were born without any understanding of language, whereas Pokémon had it right from the egg. So humans—like that—invented their own, and not just one but many. No Pokémon would have conceived it! Granted they didn’t need it, had a strange ability to understand all human speech as well, seemed to know in advance, but they never modified their own: never had a Pokémon invented language. And mathematics (so she had explained it to him once while all the others were sleeping, read the textbook by lamplight on the beach and explained each part as he looked)—mathematics too, that human invention, was like a language: it had a grammar, a syntax, many different symbols. A sentence in one language may be an action and an object, a doing and a thing to do it: mathematics had the equation, two things and a relation between them, an is or less-than or approximately. He did not quite recall everything, what part of the equation was what kind of word in Runa’s explanation, but he was, he thought, rather distracted, coiled up in her lap. She was happy to explain, glad he showed an interest, that he only wanted her to keep speaking even if he didn’t follow (a language lacked by Pokémon, it seemed). She said he was different from the rest, that he was inquisitive; she stroked him and turned the propped-up page, showed the picture, and said he had a bright mind. And then as if from nowhere, though she said it often but now, now it seemed more than a fondness but indeed a matter of record, she leaned forward, kissed his head and said,

—You can do anything, Shadow,

and then put her reading glasses on his nose. His whole face had turned pink, he knew. And she could not read well without them, nor he with them, but she continued, explained all the shapes of mathematics from memory.

Was it possible—and that would be his sickness talking, his wretched want—but was it possible that, with her philosophy, her reasoning on the nature of Pokémon (she wrote a little book on their natural gifts, would show him one day if he liked but had to rework it first, being that she was not a trainer when she wrote it), with it being right in her nature to say, Humans and Pokémon are just people in different forms, not any different in thinking … was it not possible that counted feeling as well, and love? It was the sickness talking, he knew, trying to assert itself, to force a persuasion that it wasn’t wrong, that it would be all right to let out, that somehow she already understood—would let him sleep on her lap knowing fully what that could mean to Pokémon. For that was how eggs produced, when sleeping: two Pokémon filled with the same drowsy warmth he felt with Runa fell asleep together and—oh!—an egg appeared in a white flash, like evolution, said the show. So he wished to sleep near Runa, to stretch out beside and drown in her warmth—that part was natural. (It wasn’t the same with humans: they showed love in other ways, ones the screens never told him: he would have to find out about it some day.) But that was biology; love itself was in the mind, if the mind was any more than the body (wasn’t it more than body, if there were physics?). And if that was true, wasn’t it possible—only a hope, he knew, a sweet lie, for didn’t he lie to himself? only pretend he may evolve and recover, somehow get over his sickness by acclimation—wasn’t it possible that, if Runa thought a Pokémon was a person, if a person was capable of being loved, so then may she have a chance to love him?

And that was the mark of incurable sickness, he thought, what would see him carted off one day. There the gym doors would blow open and troops of Mankey and Machoke would fly out at Torus’s command.

They paused at the last crossing; Miyuki waited at the gym door, put away her book when she saw them. He interrupted everyone, he thought, on account of his little want, blocked her study, pulled the Arcanine from her trainer’s side, all for the sake of his nerves.

“[I’m fine now,]” he said—“[really. You don’t have to— Oh!]”

The cloth slipped from his mouth: the apple fell and bounced across the stone where everyone walked—spoiled entirely. It was nearly off the kerb when the Arcanine put her paw on it and picked it up between the pads.

“[The Pondelores,]” she said, replacing the apple and taking the cloth in her teeth, pushing him across the cobbled square, “[are trillionaires. Forgive me if I don’t let any random person grab you. Arcanine’s instincts.]””

Maybe Stefan would become a Jenny, he thought. But that was the other part of it: Being so wealthy, having it in her power to have anything she liked, even if she did love a Pokémon, she would only be mad to love him.

Miyuki checked her watch and said, “They’re done in fifteen minutes. Were you going to wait? And you brought her something—that’s sweet!”

Sweet, he thought (she took the apple and the cloth and began to wipe it): sweetest of all her Pokémon by outward appearances. Suppose the apple was rotten inside—she couldn’t blame him for that, would she? He wrapped up on the cobble by the gym wall. And if, he felt, it was beyond control, if evolution did not fix the matter—if, he thought, he really cared for Runa and wanted her the best—there was only one thing he should do. For Dragonair could fly; so he ought to fly away.

But that apple, he saw—that bruised thing. It wasn’t fit for Runa now; and his stomach felt terribly raw. She mustn’t risk a germ.

[chapter continues in next part]