~~~ Chapter 75 - Elaboration ~~~

We finally made our way to the city, where we parked in a camping spot to sleep the night. There were quite a few trainers out there, milling about with their pokemon as lanky pulled out his tent and sleeping bag, packing up his bike and clothing inside.

"Guess we weren't actually that special," Lanky said.

"Whaddya mean?" a guy said, approaching us. "Are you here for the Connell Bronius panel too?"

Their conversation blurred as I took to staring at a long-eared electric lizard with big eyes that was following behind the guy. It just stared at the four of us, licking the air, its ears drooping down. I gave it an honorary leaf as Lanky and the guy talked.

They smelled Acrid and smoky. Not quite the same as Lanky and Macie's dad did when arguing, but the more they talked, the more Lanky got annoyed. He was doing that a lot with people lately. I got the sense that he wanted to leave but the new guy just kept talking and wouldn't stop.

So I made another leaf ornament for the helioptile. This one I placed on its back. It examined itself, then jumped around and rolled in the mud. By the time the guy left, the sun had gone from setting to set, and the little lizard walked around, marching around in its new leaf uniform, displaying it as much as possible for the other pokemon as it went around.

Lanky just sat down, popping out the food for us and hand-feeding the silcoon, who was clearly growing a bit antsy. You can tell because its silk was moving around a bit too much and it started to smell of anxiety.

Lanky stopped Fidget from trying to cover the silcoon in leaves. If it was about to hatch/evolve? Leaves would only make it harder. I would have made a blanket for it, but between repairing my own battle-dress, making things for Macie, then the helioptile, I had run out of silk.

When I went to sleep that night, it was another night without nightmares, which was nice. Unfortunately, the next day, we fought our gym battles with Elesa. They would have been fine, but on top of being a model, Elesa apparently fancied herself to be a bit of a DJ—which she wasn't.

And it wasn't just me, Lanky, Fidget, and even our silcoon teammate all visibly relaxed when he got the badge and we left. The battle really wasn't that hard. We just had to knock the emolga out of the air.

The music she played in the background was just annoying and gross. The kind of beats that rattled your insides, the screaming pitches that went like nails on a chalkboard.

"Well, not saying the last week or so wasn't fun and all," Lanky said, pulling out his bike and seeing it up. "But I'm already tired of this place. Let's go home."

"Leeaa," I agreed. He had the badge, we had our dumb fight with obnoxiously bad techno music, and the thought of going back home and working on building a nest and caring for the swaddlies again was so much better.

~~~

"I'm sorry, ma'am?" Scratch had said, somewhat baffled that Sarah, Liam's mother, knew her name.

"Well, Liam had mentioned you in passing on discord—"

Scratch nearly broke out in a giggle fit, before finally pulling back and finally managing to regain her composure. Sarah settled back and allowed Scratch to recompose herself.

"I'm sorry, ma'am, this day has been so strange, I'm not sure why that was the specific part that caused me to fall apart."

Sarah gave Scratch a Tut-Tut. "I know women much older than I who are more tech-savvy, I'll have you know!"

"I know, and I'm sorry. But yeah, that's me! I'm definitely not a romantic interest of Liam's or anything." Scratch managed to get out before her own eyes went wide and she started snickering her laughs again. "Hey did you know—"

"Vaaa!" Liam cried, pouting, before deciding to vigorously shake his head, making that loud slapping noise.

"Ah, what was that?" Sarah asked.

"Hey stop that!" Scratch told Liam, who stuck his tongue out innocently at her before acquiescing.

"Yeah okay, so Liam messaged me this morning and asked me to come over, said he had a bad case of waking up as a not-human."

"Yes, I received a similar message."

"Right, and he's currently effectively mute, but we have a decent yes/no/maybe communication system going until we figure out something better."

"Does he have food? Clean water? Will he be able to continue to use the apartment and facilities?" Sarah asked.

Facilities? Oh! Right. Toilet and sink.

"Vaa," he said, curt.

Wait, she's taking this all in stride way too easily!

"Uh, yeah he seems to be fine, though checking his fridge, he doesn't have much left that looks like a carnivore would want to eat. Whether or not he can might be a different condition, but I don't want to take any chances."

"I trust, then, that you'll be working with him to help establish a good diet and his needs are met?" Sarah asked, getting right to the point.

"Absolutely! It's not very often you get a friend that wakes up as an imaginary creature."

"Right, about that," Sarah said. "So, first thing's first— magic is real, which is very exciting!"

"Vaaaap!" Liam said, also agreeing.

"But beyond that, we need to consider a few things— beyond the obvious self-care issues and staying under the radar, we need to be extremely wary about what happened. I have checked every news source I could, and there is nothing on any television network or website. As far as we are aware, Liam is the only person affected by this… condition."

"... I don't follow. I mean, I know we want to stay under the radar so he's stuck indoors and out of the public eye, and he has less rights as effectively an animal under the US court structure?" Scratch said.

Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

"Miss Scratch, consider, for a moment, that gods are real."

"huh. Are you suggesting—"

"I'm a sixty-five year old hippie, child. I have long haired cows on our Tennessee farm and we sell organic milk. I've done LSD and a host of party drugs. And yet, after all these years, I still have enough experiences that I am, at-most, vaguely spiritual, mostly atheist."

Scratch knew where Sarah was going with this, but also knew better than to interrupt a person explaining something.

"And now, I'm being told that my son woke up as a species from a popular children's game."

"That might mean magic exists, but I don't—" She started to voice her own objections to Sarah's line of thinking, but accidentally trailed off before the thought completed, distracted when Liam used his tail to try and sweep the little chunks of wood up. Some were sticking to his scales.

She never was great about phone conversations, at least without some external assistance.

"Yes, well, magic does clearly exist," Sarah said. "But more than that. If magic somehow entered this world and was the catalyst for that flicker that's been going around for the last few weeks, and was responsible for Liam's state, then would we not expect that others would also have turned as well?"

"I see what you're saying. Huh. So, you think it was by intelligent design? Like Liam was chosen because he was…?"

Again, Scratch got distracted, leaving his phone on speaker to get a closer look at his tail. Bits of wood from the log he'd scratched up and swept around were sticking to him.

"Most ready? Willing to roll with the punches? These theories are just explanations that would fit the bill, at least." Sarah said over the phone.

She got Liam's attention and motioned, wondering if she could get a closer look. Liam obliged. She grabbed one, and it fell off.

"It sounds like an interesting theory, at least." Scratch said. "If we find out that the pokemon world is real, then there being deities would make some level of sense. I know that the pokemon world has a number of god-like beings in it."

She was still not entirely on board with the idea though. If these theories were accurate, then why Liam? Scratch could think of at least three forms that would fit her better than human. Why not her? They were in Los-freaking-Angeles! Surely there were other weirdos at least as into shit the same way Liam and her were!

Liam shook his head. "Eon!" He was also skeptical. Unfortunately, getting at the details of his opinions was going to be difficult, but it was pretty safe to assume he'd picked up enough lore from various discussions about pokemon that he got at least the basics of the ideas.

"But we don't really know, and might never know unless the powers that be show themselves," Sarah said. "In the meantime though, we need to get him out of the city. Unfortunately, finances are tight right now. We won't be able to fly out to help pack his things, and my eyes just aren't good enough to help drive. Liam has enough savings to last several months, but the faster he gets out of that flat, the better."

"Agreed on that, at least. I have some time off and can help to get things in order, so we can probably get him out to Tennessee before his next rent is due" Scratch had just started at a new job and had a week off scheduled for the end of the month. She had been planning on going to Mexico to celebrate not having to bum off friends or parents any more, but a friend who'd turned into a vaporeon was far, far more interesting.

"Va." He said, short and curt.

"Sorry sweet'ums, we'll get actual communication set up when you come home and we figure out the logistics," Sarah said to Liam, who let out a positive chirp in response.

"I'm uh, surprised you're both taking this all in stride," Scratch said, to Liam as much as to Sarah.

"Looks can be deceiving. We tend to have a lot more trouble with the mundane and trivial," she said. "Oh, and Scratch, can you take some pictures? Liam's sister wants pictures posted in the family discord."

"Eeeeon!" Liam declared.

"Ah, he's uh, he's saying no." Scratch said. Sarah was silent for a moment, and was wondering whether she'd be asked to bully Liam a bit.

"Oh, all right. I suppose you're not ready yet."

"Yeah, for now anyway. We'll get him to a place better suited to stay while I pack up his stuff, but I don't think there's any way of him getting out without anyone at least taking a picture."

"I'm sure Liam will have a few ideas," Sarah said.

Scratch shivered internally, correcting herself. Liam was still just as capable of making his own decisions and plans, and she needed to be sure that he was consulted appropriately.

"All right, well, I'll be here for the next couple days and we'll call each day, is now a good time of day to have regular calls?" Scratch asked. It was 5pm for her and Liam.

"It's as good as any," Sarah said. They exchanged closing pleasantries and hung up.

"Well, I guess either you were chosen on purpose or cosmic chance," Scratch said, before letting out a long exhale. "But for now we'll do what we can." Which meant packing up his things, shipping what was reasonable, and getting the rest in a car.

"Vaa" Liam said, agreeing, hopping to chew on the log some more.

"So either you're the first, or others had the same experience as you and just are magically flying under the radar somehow?" Scratch said.

Gods above, her head hurt. What was stranger is that pokemon really didn't exist until the prior thirty years or so. Why was it pokemon and not, say, Bionicle? Or My Little Pony? Or Transformers?

Greek or Norse gods, or even just any other religion from the last ten thousand years would have made more sense. Well, it really didn't matter much anyway— one of her best friends was now a vaporeon. Sarah (and, if she was being honest, Liam) probably had a better grasp on that line of thought.

Though the collective intelligence of their shared discord server could probably put a good dent into the questions.

"You could eat fish, right?" Scratch asked, noting as much down as she could remember.

"Va"

"All right. Well, I'll go get some food. This place is way too small for you though, and doesn't have enough things for you to break, so we need to get you out, so your job is to come up with a plan for getting onto the subway and buses without drawing too much attention."

What she didn't say was that he was going to have to wear a leash. Unless he could shift into water form and could be ferried around in a cooler. That would be a lot of water though.

As Scratch went out to buy a load of groceries, it took more than she'd care to admit to not default to kibble. She wouldn't want to eat that stuff, and couldn't imagine why Liam would.

~~~

While she was out, Liam had the perfect idea for a disguise. He pulled a sheet off his bed and used a claw to cut holes and put his limbs in it. It was soggy and didn't actually hide much. It really wasn't a disguise at all—at best it obscured some physical features. The reality was that Liam didn't care if people saw him.

What he did care about though, was whether or not they saw him as threatening, and having 3-inch long claws was on the wrong end of the spectra for that, though given the fact that he'd fully destroyed the log (and subsequently ate a bunch of it), he would need to be extremely careful with the poor bags of meat that humans were.

He had managed to make a partial cloak out of his bedsheets, and slice off enough chunks of fabric to get started on little booties when the door opened and Scratch walked in with a couple of bags. He'd actually found that chomping on the wood was therapeutic.

Not that it was great calories. He'd expected it was fine, anyway— vaporeon had a bit of minor lore that implied some measure of acidity.

Chewing on wood and bones for dogs was actually really healthy, so it stood to reason that, being a vaporeon now, it wasn't a harmful thing. It also helped that chewing on wood was a good activity to burn some of the excess energy.

Unfortunately,

He was extremely excited to eat some fish and get out of the house. At least, he was. Until Scratch had returned and pulled out the leash and collar.

He'd had a few passive thoughts about being willing to wear one in principle, but when presented with the idea… He would have made a kink joke if he could have, but the nascent vaporeon side of his psych was clearly not as enthused with those jokes as he himself was, judging by the immediate desire to turn into a cave roomba.

"Oh, so now you figure out how to blorp!"