Side Story - Autobiography I

"Arceus, I'm so excited to read this," Cece said as I nestled my back against her chest with Cynthia's autobiography in my hands.

"Excited? I'm more intrigued," I muttered. "Can you see okay?"

My girlfriend nodded, wrapping her hands around my waist. "It's more like I'm wondering what experiences could have turned her into the woman she is today. Plus, this is knowledge few people have. Sure, trainers from her generation probably heard about her a whole lot, but delving into her thought process is an entirely different thing."

"That's true enough," I nodded. I couldn't lie that I was salivating at the thought of getting to know Cynthia's psyche, even if she had written it a decade ago after having spent ten years in power.

I turned the first page, we started our reading.

This book is dedicated to my twin sister Celeste, my grandmother Kirsten, to the people of Sinnoh, to the past Champions who had to walk the path I tread and to future Champions who will follow in my wake. The mantle of duty is heavy, and I hope history will look upon me favorably. I have done all in my power to do good to Sinnoh, and I will continue to do so for as long as I live. On that, you have my word.

Chapter 1 - Encounter

I'd always found Celestic boring in my childhood. These days, I desperately want to go back to simpler times like the ones I lived through in that town.

In my childhood, Celestic was even more barren than it was today. The people were almost all old or young. Adults mostly left the city as soon as they could to go to greener pastures, even if they had to brave route 210 to do so. There was one school, one grocery store around a few hundred people at most. There were no televisions and only a few radios, and I remember going to the Pokemon Center to hear battles commentated on their radios as a young child. However, even the Center was old. It was underfunded, understaffed and used outdated equipment that wasn't even using the new revolutionary Ditto cells to heal Pokemon yet. The city was flanked by Mount Coronet in the west and a land of fog in the east. We were an island. Lonely, forgotten, we did not matter.

But that did not stop me from seeing all the trainers passing through the city each year. I remember asking my grandmother about the scary strangers as I looked at them out our dusty window, and she would answer 'trainers' with much disdain.

Celestic didn't like trainers. They were rude, did not respect their religion, and walked all over us because who would even stop them? Rangers? We didn't have any of those. The League was preoccupied with more important matters, and Celestic always got the short end of the stick. My grandmother blamed the government for this, and by extension trainers. It was hard not to when Celestic got no funding and help from wild Pokemon attacks always came weeks too late. We had to rely on a few old trainers and their old partners for protection.

My grandmother's hatred for trainers passed onto my sister Celeste, but me? I'd always been intrigued. They were a gate into the outside world. They carried stories, scars, new things I'd never seen before. They reminded me that there was a world beyond my little island. A world I wanted to explore.

One day when I was six, the lid blew open and I failed to contain my urges. I decided to skip school and run away from home.

It was a foolish choice by every single metric. I ran into route 210 as far away as my little legs could carry me and I got lost in the fog. The stories from trainers had made it sound like Floaroma was just a stone's throw away, and I believed I'd get there in an hour at most. And yet, I ran and ran until I collapsed on the ground and wheezed to desperately pump air into my lungs. The fact that I'd still been alive after so long out of Celestic was a miracle in itself. I stayed on the ground for a long time, just staring into the foggy sky as the mist clung to my throat. It was hard to breathe. Hard to see. Hard to think. It wasn't the middle of winter quite yet, but it was cold up in the mountains and my clothes were wet from the fog.

I thought I'd die here, but I was happy I'd seen something else. A new slice of the world I'd never known. I remember it clear as day, laughing and coughing as I waited for a wild

Pokemon to snatch me away.

What came up to me was a Gible.

She'd been wounded, and I didn't know from what. She was practically crawling on the floor and her eyes were hollow. Dried blood covered her and bled into her red stomach. Gible collapsed next to me as I stared at her.

I held out a hand and touched her head.

She blinked at me and growled.

I don't exactly remember who fell unconscious first. Eventually, I closed my eyes and just drifted off to sleep.

I didn't wake up in the afterlife. There was no Arceus to greet me and hug me with its thousand arms. No bliss. Instead, I felt a hand touch my shoulder. Old man Richmond had come to look for me with his two Arcanines. He was a Great War veteran that was arguably the most powerful trainer in Celestic. He'd seen fighting at the front between Kanto and Johto and seen one of Zapdos' avatars with his own eyes. The war had abused him. Scars covered his entire body, from shallow ones to large ones that couldn't be ignored, and it was the same for his two Arcanine. At first, he thought that Gible had hurt me, and he considered killing her. War veterans are almost all gone today, but they were everywhere when I was a child, living out their twilight years. The war had scarred them all, and they knew killing and death as much as breathing, sleeping and eating. He wasn't going to let a member of his community be hurt without passing retribution.

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I vehemently defended Gible, yelling with such vigor that my throat hurt for hours afterward. I distinctly remember the shift in his eyes then. He'd turned from a soldier back into an old man. Still, no matter how many times I pleaded with him, he left Gible there to die and carried me on his shoulder back to Celestic. I got an earful from every single adult I passed that evening. An event like a child running away was obviously the talk of town, and everyone had something to say about it.

As for my grandmother? She was just glad I was alive, as was my sister. People told her she needed to raise me right for this to never happen again. Kirsten never hit me or my sister. She'd gone through so much, losing her daughter in childbirth and we never knew our father. My mother had been too scared to tell her the man's name, and it is easy to understand what happened to her now that I'm an adult.

I am the daughter of a rapist, and so is my twin sister Celeste.

It has weighed on my mind for years, and it is my first time exposing that fact to the world. I now know who my father is since he contacted me when I became the Champion, but we're getting ahead of ourselves, aren't we?

A few weeks passed, but the attention around my escape never died down. Again, Celestic was slow in every aspect of life. Whenever I went to school, the other children would ask me to tell them about the outside. The world beyond the fog and the mountain. I lied and embellished what I'd seen, saying that I saw great towers of steel like those 'skyscrapers' the trainers from other cities liked to talk about, or that I saw great battles between wild Pokemon. It was the first time I'd made any friends. I didn't know it at the time, but our family were outcasts, and adults often told their children not to play with me or Celeste because we'd been born out of wedlock. They'd call us bastards under their breaths when our backs were turned. Celestic was old, and with age came prejudice and discrimination.

The Gible I'd seen still fascinated me. We had shared a moment, and yet I had abandoned her. Was she dead? If she wasn't, where was she now? Had the Pokemon that attacked her struck again? Questions upon questions. I wanted to run away again, but my grandmother would suffer again if I did. I'd asked old man Richmond to take me there again, but he wouldn't budge.

Curiosity has always driven me from a young age, and it still does. Questions have always consumed me, and I needed answers even if my life was at stake.

So I hatched a plan.

Celeste and I shared a bed due to how small our home was, and after begging for days, I convinced her not to tattle to our grandmother, but she would only agree if I let her come with me to protect me. We snuck out in the middle of the night, armed with a kitchen knife and one of grandma's old gas lights. Two six-years-olds in the middle of one of the deadliest routes in the region with no Pokemon of their own.

Our bravado didn't last long. Celeste clung to my arm the entire way through as I called for Gible's name. I didn't even know if she was still there, and the plan was stupid, but we were children. We didn't know any better.

My actions would not be without consequences.

It was a Zangoose that came upon us first. It was probably famished, because it was thin and ragged. Two human children would be easy pickings for it even if it was weakened. I gripped the knife tightly and waited for it to come. In retrospect, Zangoose was rather weak, young and inexperienced. Its movements were clumsy and slow as it dashed toward us, but we had no way of outrunning it.

That didn't mean we didn't try.

Celeste ran slower than I did, and I turned back when I heard her scream. She was lying on the ground with two huge gashes in her back and blood seeped out of her wounds. The gas lamp had fallen on the ground, the glass around it having shattered. I couldn't think. I ran toward Zangoose with a knife in hand to save her, but I stopped dead in my tracks when Gible appeared out of the fog and bit into its shoulder. Her wounds were healed, but still present. The first scars that would ever mar her body. I dragged my sister away from the fight and tried to press down on her back to stop the bleeding. That was all I knew about wounds. Bleeding was bad, and it needed to be stopped. I nearly hurled when I saw all the blood on my hands, but after thirty seconds I turned back toward Gible.

She was losing.

Zangoose was too quick and nimble to get caught without the element of surprise, and its claws could pierce through the young dragon's scales. The last licks of light from the lamp illuminated their battle, but everything beyond was a sea of fog and darkness. As if the four of us were the only people in the world, fighting for survival. A primal feeling rose in my chest at that moment. It was the first time I'd ever felt something like this. As my sister lay, crying and bleeding at my feet, as Zangoose fought desperately not to starve, as Gible defended us with all she had.

I felt joy. A twisted, broken kind of satisfaction.

I gripped my knife as tight as I could until the color drained from my hands, and I circled around the fight. I abandoned my sister. I wanted to fight. To live. To experience.

Something clicked in my brain. I saw battle. I understood it. I wanted it. I craved it. It was my oxygen! My sustenance! Without it, I would die, or at least that was how I felt in the moment.

Orders flew out of my mouth before I even had time to think about them. Not moves, but strategy. I told Gible when to jump back, to go in and claw or bite Zangoose. When openings presented themselves, I would run in as quickly as I could and stab my knife into Zangoose. My arms were that of a child, so the wounds were shallow, but it served as a distraction for Gible to strike. We fought for what seemed like forever. My mouth was wide open, grinning from ear to ear until it hurt.

I was having the time of my life.

Until Zangoose slashed across my gut and sent me flying.

Gible managed to force it the flee as I got up. My cut was shallower than Celeste's, and I could still walk, although barely. My smile vanished when I realized that Celeste was still on the ground. She was still breathing, although barely. We were forty minutes out of town, and I would never have the strength to carry her the entire way. The magnitude of the situation slowly sunk in. My sister was almost dead, and it was my fault.

What would the adults say?

I spoke with Gible with a trembling voice, and she helped me carry Celeste with her mouth. She was careful not to bite down too hard and we got back without further incidents. I put as much pressure on her wounds as I could. When we were home, she was unconscious. I told Gible to meet me at the city's entrance again in a month and she fled into the night.

I was given the dressing down of a lifetime. Dozens of people yelling at me, saying that it was a miracle Celeste was alive, that I was the devil in disguise, possessed, awful, a monster. My grandmother joined in this time, and it was completely justified. I had done a mistake, and we had only just barely survived.

The voices sounded far away to me. What I cared about was what I'd felt during the battle. It was a burst of ecstasy that I needed to feel again no matter what. I was placed under lockdown in my grandmother's house as soon as my wounds were patched up, and my sister would have to stay in the hospital for months. We were twins, and we would have twin scars. Hers on her back and mine on my stomach.

From that point on, I wanted not only to explore but to chase the thrill of battle.