Larry turned in his sleep, he felt the plush of his mattress underneath him, and he also smelt the stink of his room. The hum of thousands of tires rolling across the streets outside of his apartment droned away, a normal human would tune the noise out, but this is different from the usual utter silence of the caverns of Mt. Silver to Larry. His eyes cracked open for a moment and the lower field of vision of a human immediately made him squint his eyes back closed.

‘Wha…’ Slowly attempting to crack his eyes open multiple times, hoping to adjust them to the field of view, Larry finally manages to open his eyes properly. His room is laid out in front of him, empty bottles and plastic food containers, dirty laundry, and other trash line the floor. Paraphernalia of various kinds is strewn about haphazardly and dirt and mold cling to every room surface.

The room's windows have been completely covered with cut pieces of cardboard, blocking out any possible light that the room might be subjected to. Larry's head swivels around the room in sheer and utter terror, he grasps the side of his bed, as he realizes that he has fingers again and immediately recoils when he touches the open top of a plastic bottle filled almost to spilling with a yellow liquid he knows to be urine.

He licks his lips and swallows spit that had been building up in his mouth before stuttering out a sentence, “Wha-, Ish da-, huh?” His instincts seemed to work against him, as the gears in his mind still struggled to determine the intricacies of human speech and what was happening.

Outside of his room, a car in the distance honks, and Larry jumps at the noise for a second, before looking at the corner the noise originated from in panic. His head whirled to the other side of the room, where a lawnmower had just started up loudly. Larry stayed completely still, still quite overwhelmed with his current reality.

‘I-, I just fought that Mismagius?’ Looking down at the pee bottles, he finds a rare Dr. Pepper nestled on the edge, still two-thirds filled, Larry leans forward to grab onto its neck. The bed creaked under his weight and Larry finally looked down at himself as he grabbed onto the neck of the bottle.

Fat. Layers of it, rolls upon rolls of fat filled up his figure, and his entire body spilled out and over himself and onto the bed itself. As he lifted the bottle of soda, his entire body jolted and jiggled disgustingly. The trained, taut, and stony skin of a Larvitar was nowhere to be found and Larry sorely missed it.

His thoughts trailed in circles, ‘Why am I back here?’

Tears began to well up in his eyes, and Larry quickly took a swig of Dr. Pepper before wiping at his eyes. The sweetness was far too much for Larry, his face scrunched up at the taste and he quickly swallowed the drink.

His head swiveled around again as the tears continued to accumulate, ‘What is going on?’

Another swig of Dr. Pepper and the tears finally flowed freely. He wiped at his eyes, he still remembered the pain, and the hardships he went through. His mom, the family of Wooper, the Phanpy, and its father who’d led him back up the cavern. The Dwebble who had shown him the ropes instead of attacking him. All of it.

“It couldn’t have been a dream…” Larry whispered to himself.

Just as he was about to drop into the second stage of the seven stages of grief, the noise around him cut off. Larry's head swiveled around once more and when it returned to his hands, the Dr. Pepper he’d been holding was gone. He jerked back in shock, “Wha-!”

The sudden movement jostled his body, and his entire arm jiggled, like the bones inside his body had finally given up and disappeared. Larry tried to support his arm with his other hand, only to find the other one bent and broken when he looked down at it. The bone of his upper arm stuck out gruesomely and his lower arm hung on by piece of flesh still connecting the two.

“ARGH!” Immediately a spike of pain shot through his body and Larry grit his teeth in pain, the tears formerly shed for the other world he’d lived in now redoubled for the physical pain he felt. Larry shut his eyes at the sheer amount of pain his arm was in, and when he tried to open them again, he found doing so to be practically impossible.

When he finally cracked his eyes open, he wasn’t in his room anymore. He was lying in the street on his back, the rain pattered on his body and every single droplet felt like knives to him, yet he couldn’t find the energy or rush of adrenaline to do something about it.

His ears rang and every single breath felt like a herculean task, through the ringing he could hear sirens in the distance and people talking and screaming. His eyes focused and he finally noticed a woman above him, she sat next to him on her knees and had her head turned to another person behind her. He couldn’t make out enough of the conversation and his mind didn’t care anymore.

‘I’m dead,’ The thought was obvious to any onlooker of the scene before them.

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

A small box truck sat parked on the edge of an intersection, and an overweight man in his late twenties to early thirties was sprawled out on his back in the middle of the intersection. The truck had been speeding but unfortunately for him, the man hadn’t watched for green lights on the crossing, neglecting the fact to look at his phone.

A female bystander had given it her best effort to resuscitate the man, but when the woman and her husband rushed into the intersection, they realized their effort was in vain.

Larry's world once again began to lose color, he accepted his situation, merely resigning himself to look up at the moon in the distance as the woman next to him jumped back in shock at his shell-shocked expression and the fact that he had been alive in the first place, as she had never felt a pulse.

She turned back to her husband in hysterics as the sirens of an ambulance in the distance slowly came closer and Larry slowly eased into the darkness. The noises of the world faded away and Larry passed out once again.

…

Instincts took over and Larry gasped in a breath and shot up from his lying position. Immediately, the usual cavern's darkness came into view to Larry as he rose from his position in his mother's arms. His mom had laid down in an outcropping of the walkway, she must’ve carried out Larry's fainted and battered body.

“Larry!” His mother had been watching him and immediately crushed him in a hug the second he woke up.

“Oof! Mom!” Larry reciprocated as well as he could and felt his eyes sting with tears as he nestled himself inside his second mother's arms. Both due to pain and the sheer happiness at being back.

“Larry…I-” Larry's mom started before being cut off by Larry.

“I’m sorry I got kidnapped! I love you!” He yelled out his thoughts immediately, tears streaming down his face. His entire body hurt, but he couldn’t handle holding back his thoughts.

His mother squeezed him ever tighter and Larry let her, the two of them simply sat there in the outcropping, hugging out their feelings.

‘I almost died there, didn’t I?’ Larry thought grimly, ‘Why’d I go back to the other world? Did I? Or was that just some dream or hallucination?’

Larry never actually remembered being hit by the truck, his mind was in disarray and all the formerly human thoughts had been so jumbled and faint. His Pokemon knowledge had been well used recently and he had a great handle on it, but the human side of things?

If he could forget, Larry would’ve. His life had been a mess, an overweight hoarder who did nothing all day but lay in his bed and he hated himself for how he had let his life get to that point. His life as a Larvitar had been so fun he wanted to punch his past self for rotting himself away in his own home.

Silence reigned for a long few minutes as both shed tears and the two simply took in the moment of safety, before his mom finally spoke up factually, “That was dangerous.”

He’d survived.

All the adrenaline he’d woken up with had sputtered out by now and Larry turned his head up to his mom, meeting her gaze, “Yeah.”

“You could’ve died!’ His mom yelled at him angrily.

“Almost did,” Larry muttered back, remembering whatever had happened to him.

She turned her gaze over to the cavern he’d been kidnapped down, the walkway didn’t look much worse for wear, but Larry also couldn’t see down the cavern so he’d simply assumed the worst.

“That Mismagius…” She smoldered, “If ghosts could die, I would’ve killed him again!”

His mom couldn’t retort, so Larry spoke once again, with a teary grin up at his mom, “But I survived.”

…

The damage from his fight was still far too great for Larry to move around much. He’d slept for far longer than normal according to his mom, and with no way to tell time in the cavern his mom didn’t know how long, but she’d thought that he might never wake up.

His mother had made short work of the Mismagius, her Dark-Typing making the fight an easy matchup. She hadn’t gone into detail about the fight that had transpired after Larry went unconscious, simply stating that “It was lucky it couldn’t die.”

With the short dream, hallucination, or impromptu third reincarnation back into his old body, Larry had found a new appreciation for his second shot at life. He felt spoiled that he was allowed to do this and it made him wonder if this is what everyone went through or if he was special for some reason.

‘No, there must be more to it.’ He concluded, ‘If this is some sort of godly plan or pure happenstance, I should make the best of it and simply try to live to the best of my abilities. God knows I wasted away my first shot.’

The hard part was figuring out what he wanted out of his second life. Being a Pokemon made one powerful, and in Larry's case, it was one of the most powerful in the region. He had potential, fighting potential, and during his second life, Larry realized that he loved fighting.

It wasn’t just Pokemon instincts making him feel a certain way, Larry knew it. That fight had almost cost him his life, and Larry loved every second of it. That Mismagius had been looking to kill him when it realized its kidnapping attempt had failed and the power Larry felt when fighting it had been real.

If his mother hadn’t been as vigilant and simply kept walking, he would’ve been dead right now. Dead or kidnapped, whatever that entailed. Larry knew to become stronger he needed to get out of Mt. Silver, not because there were no opponents for him here, but because he knew he couldn’t do it alone.

Sure, his mom had given him some sort of spartan training regiment she saw fit to train a young Larvitar and prepare them to survive on their own. But his mother was still just a wild Pokemon, she knew the world around her and nothing more. In Mt. Silver, she was one of the most powerful Pokemon that one could ever hope to meet, but outside? She was the definition of a big fish in a small pond. The world is a large place and Larry knows what he needs to do.

Get nice and comfortable with a human, and hope to god, Arceus, or whatever other deity deigned him a second chance that said humans don’t stick him in a Pokeball and treat him like a wild animal meant to be controlled, but a friend.