I had hoped the authorities would respond with force when they heard about Team Rocket’s operation. But I wasn’t quite prepared for the level of force they deemed was necessary after Officer Bragg decided to believe me.
It started with just a few dots in the sky, miles away against the blue over the mountains. I was the first to notice them, laying on my back in the grass and staring in their direction, but I initially dismissed them as a flock of pidgeys simply because of how many there were. But as they drew closer, flying in a perfectly straight line, I realized they were much too big to be simple first-stage pokemon, and I pushed myself into a sitting position.
“You know anything about that?” I called to Officer Bragg, who’d been messaging and talking on his device almost non-stop for the last twenty minutes. He glanced to the sky before nodding.
“That’s the reinforcements. Follow me.”
We walked to the edge of town — not too long of a walk, given how small Merraga was, and a few curious townspeople followed behind with a mishmash of pet pokemon by their sides.
The flyers grew larger as we waited for their arrival, and I started to be able to pick out a few of the pokemon: one fearow, a couple of pidgeottos and pidgeotto fusions, and even a massive tropius loaded down with supplies in the back. But once I saw the pokemon leading the charge, a woman with recognizable blue-green hair on its back, I could focus on nothing else.
The noivern-noctowl fusion glided to a stop in the field in front of us without a sound as the rest of the convoy landed behind it in a storm of wind. And from its back jumped Officer Jenny, the symbol for Fuschia City on her hat.
Officer Jennys and Nurse Joys was one of the most curious ways in which this world mimicked the anime. There were dozens of them scattered across the regions, seemingly indistinguishable to everyone except each other, and aside from the champions and pokemon professors they were some of the most respected trainers in the world. Gym leaders were more powerful, both as trainers and politically, but only because Nurse Joys and Officer Jennys refused to get involved in politics and their teams were typically limited to less than three pokemon. They were still powerful, much more so than the average trainer, but the respect they commanded came from their ideals rather than their strength.
Officer Jennys and Nurse Joys were paragons of their respective fields of justice and healing. It didn’t matter how corrupt the rest of the police force or city’s authorities might be — an Officer Jenny would always pursue justice, regardless of whose nose it might tweak or where the trail might lead. And regardless of your status, ability to pay, or the severity of yours or your pokemon’s injuries, everyone knew that if you made it to a pokemon center with a Nurse Joy inside, you would be taken care of.
The world would be a much better place if there were more Officer Jennys and Nurse Joys around, but unfortunately they were extremely limited in number. I had only seen a Nurse Joy a few times before, and never an Officer Jenny. There were constant rumors that the Lavender Town pokemon center would be getting a Nurse Joy in the next year or two, but those rumors had been flying around every year since I woke up in this world and had yet to come to fruition. Currently, only those Kantonian cities with gyms had Nurse Joys.
There were a multitude of theories of how exactly Nurse Joys and Officer Jenny’s worked. Some thought they were twins, identical sisters in a massive family that never seemed to age. Others thought they were aliens or angels, messengers of a benevolent higher power. And still others thought they were pokemon, having somehow learned human speech and how to avoid capture. No one with any power was asking, for fear that the Joys and Jennys would leave their city to serve their ideals somewhere else, and the women weren’t offering up any explanation.
I had my own theories, of course, but that was all irrelevant as the Officer Jenny in front of me walked forward with a frown to speak with Officer Bragg. The noivowl followed behind her, the feathered, bat-like form casting a shadow over the officers.
And then she turned to me with a smile.
“Hello! I’m Officer Jenny! You’re Marcus?”
“Y-yes,” I said, my voice cracking, and I winced. There were a multitude of fan clubs for the Officer Jennys and Nurse Joys for several different reasons, and I would be lying if I denied being at least a bit of fan myself.
Her smile widened. “Nice to meet you! I hear you’re the one who found this hideout when you were out exploring someplace you weren’t supposed to be.” She winked at me. “Don’t worry, I won’t give you a fine for that. In the future though, if you see that someplace is blocked off or a sign telling you to keep out, please respect it. They’re usually there for your safety.”
“…understood.”
She gave an approving nod before her smile turned more neutral. “I know you’ve already talked to Officer Bragg, but why don’t you run through everything with me, one more time. Start at the beginning, please.”
I nodded. “I arrived into town the day before yesterday…”
It took a little bit for me to find my rhythm, but Officer Jenny was a good listener, nodding along and only occasionally interrupting to ask insightful questions about things I might not have thought to mention — like the fact that hardly any of Team Rocket’s supplies seemed to be long-term, with everything set up in temporary tents and packed away in crates.
“Hmm. That probably means that either the operation is only temporary, or they’re close enough to a population center for them to resupply what they need daily. Although the grunts complaining about not seeing the sun seems to conflict with both of those…” she mused, before nodding at me. “Continue, please.”
It took another couple of minutes, during which the rest of the officers were unpacking supplies carried in on the tropius and setting up a large tent for what I presumed was a temporary base of operations, but eventually I finished my story.
“You’re lucky you got off so easily,” Officer Jenny commented with a stern frown. “You know that, right?”
“Yeah, I know…”
She nodded before smiling again. “As long as you learn from it. You may be on your adventure, but that doesn’t mean you can’t be safe, too!” This last was said with a strange cadence, as if it was the motto of an ad campaign, and I gave a dubious nod in response. She grinned before turning and yelling at one of the other officers. “Jennings! You ready?” After hearing the affirmative, she turned back to me. “We’ll be raiding the caves, now. I doubt they’ll have stuck around for long after you escaped — Team Rocket is annoyingly good at disappearing if you give them half the chance, but maybe we’ll get lucky. Between your description, noivowl’s hearing, and arcasol’s nose,” she gestured to the massive bird-bat pokemon over her shoulder and patted the other pokeball on her belt, “…we should be able to find their cave no problem. But just in case, stay in town for the next few hours. I might be able to find someone to give you a ride out to Fuschia City afterward, if you want it.”
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I gave an emphatic nod. I hadn’t originally planned on visiting Fuschia City next — I wanted to eventually challenge some gyms, and Pewter City was the traditional starting point for most trainers on their journey. But even if I immediately left Fuschia after getting there, flying would save me hours of travel time.
Plus, I’d get to fly. Despite how the games might’ve made it seem, pokemon with the ability to carry humans through the sky weren’t as common as one might think.
“It’s settled then! Be back in a jiffy!”
And with that, I settled back in to wait.
It wasn’t something I was typically very good at, as my parents could attest. But in the wake of my clash with Team Rocket, I found myself not minding the downtime as much as I normally would.
----------------------------------------
“We need to have a conversation,” I said, my voice serious.
Officer Jenny had led most of the other officers off on the raid fifteen minutes earlier, after which the man in charge of Merraga’s ‘pokemon center’ had returned Hobbes and the sableye to me, mostly recovered. Hobbes was still obviously exhausted, but his costume was back in place and he had no injuries that I could see. The sableye continued to hunch in on itself, flinching away anytime I or anyone else made too loud of a noise or moved too suddenly, but I took the man’s word that he was at least mostly physically recovered. I still planned to bring him to a better-equipped pokemon center once we got to Fuschia…assuming this conversation went well.
I led the sableye a couple dozen yards away from the temporary police headquarters to give us some privacy before sitting down in the grass, gesturing for Hobbes to sit to my right and the sableye across from me. Then, very carefully, I set my cell phone down in the grass to my left, completing the square.
“All of us need to have a conversation,” I continued, looking pointedly at the phone. And then I waited. Five, ten, fifteen seconds…until finally, reluctantly, a red and blue duck-like pokemon materialized above the phone in a kaleidoscope of geometric shapes.
A porygon: an extremely rare and unique pokemon, famous for the fact that it was the first pokemon to be artificially created. I couldn’t say I was surprised though; given the last few hours to clear my head, it wasn’t too hard to deduce what was hiding in my phone.
There were only a few pokemon that could hide themselves so completely within my device, and only one I knew who could learn the move magnet rise, one of the few possible explanations for the miraculous temporary disappearance of gravity in the crevasse. Coupled with the fact that we had been exploring around an old Silph Co. headquarters, the purported creators of the first porygon several decades earlier, and the puzzle pieces started to fit together.
“How long have you been out here?” I asked with a gentle voice, well aware that, despite its friendly and innocuous appearance, I was still dealing with a wild pokemon.
“Beep, beep beep, bzzzt. Beep bzzzzt,” the porygon responded, and I frowned. This was the first time I’d ever heard a pokemon ‘talking’ without using its name, and a glance at Hobbes confirmed that he was just as lost as I was.
“Sorry, I didn’t get that. How about yes-no questions? Beep for yes, and buzz for no.”
“…beep.”
“Have you been here for the last forty years? Ever since the old Silph Co. office closed?”
“Beep bzzzt.”
I rubbed my temples, realizing this would be more difficult than I expected. But then the porygon beeped again, catching my attention before it dropped from where it was floating to the ground, its eyes closing.
“You’ve been…asleep?”
“…beep, bzzt.”
“Power-saving mode,” I guessed again, realization striking, and the porygon beeped. “You were somehow left behind when the Silph Co. offices were abandoned. But there’s no technology in Merraga, there hasn’t been for decades. At least not the type you can inhabit, none with cyberspace — at least not until I left my phone in the grass to chase after Hobbes the other night.”
The porygon beeped again, sounding a little guilty, and I nodded. I was sure there was more to the porygon’s story — there was no way it could be out here for forty years without there being more story to tell, power-saving mode or not. But that wasn’t the conversation we needed to have right now. “Don’t worry, I’m not mad at you. You did what you had to, and you saved my bacon back there with Team Rocket. You’ve much more than paid me back for any issues you might’ve caused on my phone. But we need to talk about your plans going forward.” I paused, glancing at the sableye to make sure he knew I was also talking to him here, and then nodding once I confirmed I had his full attention. “Option one: you can go free here and make yourself a home in the wilderness around Merraga.”
“Bzzzt, bzzzt!”
I chuckled as I held up a hand to forestall the porygon’s protests. “Don’t worry, I won’t force you into any of the options, and there are others too.” Once the porygon calmed down, I continued. “Option two: come with me to Fuschia, and you can go free there. Now, there are some caveats to that; they don’t allow just any wild pokemon to roam the streets of a big city like Fuschia, especially not pokemon as powerful as you two have the potential to be, but there’s plenty of wilderness nearby for you to make a home if you’re looking for a change of scenery. That wouldn’t be too different from if you were to stay here, though, with one potential exception: the Safari Zone. You both belong to rare enough species of pokemon that I think you’ll be granted admittance. In the Safari zone, you’ll be fed, taken care of, and safe from predators, poachers, or malicious trainers like Team Rocket.” I glanced at sableye as I said the last, but he had no noticeable reaction. “Also, there will be a lot of trainers in Fuschia. I can leave you with the pokemon center, and I’m sure they’ll be able to find you a trainer whose goals match your own, whether that’s to be a competitive battler on victory road or to be a pet pokemon living the rest of your days out in indolence. You especially, porygon. I don’t know if there’s a company in the world that would turn away the digital protection that you can offer.”
The man who’d healed Hobbes and the sableye confirmed that sableye hadn’t been captured, which meant that in the eyes of the league he was essentially a wild pokemon. I was a little worried that the officers might try to stake some claim to him as ‘evidence’ in their investigation into Team Rocket, but I was determined to ensure he would be given the option to live a life away from the horrible captivity he had previously suffered.
The porygon and sableye were obviously listening to my words, but neither looked particularly enthused by any of the previous options. So, taking a deep breath, I started my final pitch. “Or, option three: you join me on my journey. I would become your trainer, and you would be my pokemon.”
“Kyu!! Di, di!”
I chuckled. “Yeah, I agree with Hobbes. The best option, but we’re both a bit biased.”
That diffused some of the tension that had built over the last few minutes, and the sableye finally broke his silence. “Say say, saybleye.”
I looked to Hobbes for the translation, who thankfully was better able to understand the sableye than the porygon, relaying the message in a few squeaks of his own.
“What’s my goal?” I reiterated, and the sableye nodded. “That’s a big question. Lots of trainers would give the easy answer: to be the strongest, to train until they’re the very best in their region, if not the world.” I shook my head. “I don’t really subscribe to that. Don’t get me wrong, I want to be strong. On that front, my goal is to get all eight Kanto badges, and if you were to come with me you would definitely need to train hard. But strength is just a means to an end, not the end itself. Getting strong just for the sake of getting strong…” I shook my head. “No hate to those trainers who have that as their goal, but to me that always felt a bit…hollow.” I shifted to lay on my back, staring up at the sky as I continued to talk. “For me, it’s about the adventure. This world is amazing, with so many places to explore and mysteries to solve. Look at what I’ve seen and experienced just in the first couple of days after leaving home. I intend to experience as much as I can of what this world has to offer. But more than that, I want to experience it with my friends.” I tilted my head up from the ground and smiled at Hobbes, who trilled back. “Hobbes is my best friend. I hope the rest of my pokemon will be similarly good friends, both with me and with each other. To me, chasing adventure is just as meaningless as wanting to be ‘the best’ if you don’t have friends to share that adventure with.” I took a deep breath before meeting the eyes of the sableye and porygon once again. “So that’s my goal: to build a team of best friends, a team that’s strong enough to survive whatever this world throws at us. And to see as much of this wide, amazing world as we are able.”
I pulled out two pokeballs from my backpack — my last two pokeballs, after the ditto’s ball had broken after it fused with Hobbes — and placed them on the ground in front of the porygon and sableye.
“What do you say?”