Chapter 10: Haunting Laugh

I panted there for a moment, on my hands and knees, trying to make sense about what had happened. My mind was jumbled from the mental payload Absol had dropped in it.

With a heave, I pushed myself to my feat. I was surprised to find the audience completely quiet, though Moltres’ fires were still dancing among them.

With a deep breath, I recentered myself. It was time to make my decision. Seedot or Duskull. It was a difficult choice.

The image of the ghost and I conquering death was incredibly tempting. Also, until I got the little acorn to evolve and gain its dark typing, I’d be cultivating at a fraction of the speed of everyone else. I wouldn’t have a chance at my aspirant tournament, but that was the least of my concerns.

Perhaps, if I was seen picking a grass type over a ghost, some of the suspicion over my malignant typing would be mitigated, and that was my real worry.

Professor Oak wouldn’t be there to protect me all the time, and the murderous looks hadn’t faded, even with the soothing fire. I needed to do something to show everyone I wasn’t the monster they feared me to be. If not, I’d likely be chased out of town… or worse.

However, most importantly, I had moved on. It was this world that I wished to be a part of, not the old one. It had taken a long time to let go, and get to this point. Choosing the ghost, I could tell, would cause me to fall back to my old obsessions. That person was gone!

Even with that conviction, it was with incredible reluctance that I made my decision. I knelt down and fished a tiny ball from my pocket. With a click, it enlarged from the size of a marble to larger than a baseball. It was so shiny, I could see little reflections of Moltres’ flames shimmering across its surface.

This Pokeball was one of the few things I had ever bought from Silph CO. All of my spares I’d gotten from Walace’s Trubbish; a second hand store. As an orphan, I was a frequent customer, and had built a decent relationship with Walace.

That being said, it felt wrong to use one of my refurbished spares. Their tops were worn, with scratches through the red and white paint, but I'd been assured they would still function perfectly. I trusted Walace not to screw me, but I just had to have a new one for my starter—even if they cost ten times more. Stupid sentimentality was going to make me a beggar.

I was hesitating. This wasn’t the time to think about my finances.

A deep breath later, and I presented the ball to the grass type. She hopped in excitement, a grin appeared on her shell. The happy dance melted some of the tension that had been building within me, and I couldn’t help the smile that began to form. That froze, however, as I had a realization. Seedots didn’t have mouths.

I watched in bewilderment as the dance became more frantic and the smile grew wider and wider, until the shell was nearly cut in half.

The mouth opened, revealing a maw filled with razor sharp teeth, and the terrifying acorn began to laugh. It was a deep, wheezing chuckle that didn’t match its diminutive body at all. It was hauntingly familiar, and I was frozen in shock as it grew louder and the mouth opened wider.

I couldn’t help the yelp that escaped me when the jaw unhinged a full 180 degrees, and out hopped a little black fox. A Zorua.

Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.

The horrifyingly twisted Seedot faded away, revealing itself to be an illusion. I was so shocked that I didn’t even react as the trickster Pokemon gave me a cheeky grin and pressed its nose to the Pokeball. The lid popped open, and sucked her body in with a flash of red light. The ball wiggled for a moment before releasing a quiet chime, signaling a successful capture.

I stayed frozen like that for a moment, kneeling with my hand outstretched. There were too many surprises today. My brain was officially fried.

The explosion that went off against my chest was quite the wakeup call. I think I blacked out for a moment, but when I came to, I was flat on my back. For a second I just laid there, with an incessant ringing in my ear. Slowly, that faded, and I could faintly hear a strange rumbling noise nearby.

It was a struggle, but I pushed myself up with a couple choking gasps; the breath had been knocked out of me.

Through blurry eyes, I found myself in the middle of a warzone. A transparent dome circled over me, but outside was a chaotic mess as attacks of every kind impacted against it.

I could vaguely make out Oak, facing down a group of trainers, whose numbers seemed to increase with every passing moment. The rest of the crowd fled into the forest.

“Get him out of here!” the professor bellowed. I felt a tingling sensation across my skin, and—in a blink—I was somewhere else.

‘Wait there until Samuel is finished,’ Alakazam's voice echoed in my head. I looked around for the psychic, but they weren’t here. I think they were communicating with me telepathically all the way from the ceremony grounds… while battling the citizens of Pallet… because they tried to kill me.

I collapsed to the floor, hyperventilating. They had tried to murder me! These weren’t strangers. Pallet Town was small enough that I knew most of its inhabitants, which meant they knew me too... and they still wanted me dead.

The hatred for Dark and Ghost primes was well known, and I guess it was amplified by the fact I had both, but to this extent? Maybe the Zorua had pushed them over the edge.

The dark foxes were one of the most detested pokemon known to mankind. Their evolution, Zoroark, were said to infiltrate communities and slowly consume them from within. They’d kill and replace people one by one, causing neighbor to turn on neighbor as they tried to remove the infiltrator.

In their native land of Unova, they were so feared that it was tradition to perform a handshake and aura communion when first meeting someone—an incredibly intimate act in the Kanto region—to prove you weren’t an imposter; they could imitate a human’s body, but not their soul.

The masters of illusion had only appeared in Indigo a few decades ago, stowing away in boats when trade between the regions had become more industrial. There had been a few incidents since, and the fear had spread like wildfire.

I had hoped to ease tension by picking Seedot, and had gotten the exact opposite with Zorua. Perfect.

With a force of will, I brought my breathing back under control and got back on my feet. I was in the Professor’s lab… I think. Massive derelict machines lined the steel walls, with a few dusty tables and chairs in the middle. Probably one of the isolated testing chambers deep in the complex. Gary and I had gotten in trouble a couple times when we were caught exploring here as little kids.

As much as I’d have loved to give it a more thorough look now that I was more knowledgeable, and could potentially understand what all this fancy equipment did, the adrenaline was beginning to fade and bone deep exhaustion seeped in to replace it.

My aura reserves were almost completely gone. That’d never happened before. The last of it was used blocking that first attack. It had all happened too quickly for me to tell what had actually hit me, but from the fist sized hole burnt in my shirt, right over my heart, it was meant to kill… I think I’d underestimated the value of an aura shield before. Screw faster thinking, the life preserving barrier was my favorite use of aura.

I shuffled over to one of the office chairs, and collapsed into it. With a pull of a handle, I folded the backrest flat and kicked my feet up onto the desk. I’d caught many of the lab assistants sleeping like this. At the time, it looked terribly uncomfortable, but—considering I was asleep a second later—they may be onto something.