The boat tumbles endlessly, flailing Shane around like a helpless glove in a tropical storm. Direction is unfindable, up and down interchange constantly.
It is filling with water rapidly, Shane only occasionally feels some bubbles of air passing by his face.
The first few seconds consist of a downright violent beating of Shane, as the boat gets smashed against trees and buildings from a violent force of nature. No wonder, considering the situation he is finding himself in.
Then, it calms down, just a little. The boat, with Shane helplessly trapped inside, continues to spin.
A minute passes, perhaps more. Shane has no way of breathing.
“What if it doesn’t float? Will it ever drain so I can breathe?” Shane panickedly repeats to himself in his mind with closed eyes, direly holding onto the handles with cramped hands.
Still shaken from the last words of Robert, his heart races from the urgent thought of maybe dying by drowning himself.
The boat stabilizes and doesn’t tumble anymore, but Shane is quickly getting out of air.
Suddenly, it feels like he’s weightless. Just for a split second, he wonders what’s happening.
*Thud*.
The boat seems to land on something soft.
Did he finally surface?
A small pocket of air quickly forms at the top of the cabin. Shane gasps for the little air he can catch from it.
Little by little, the pocket expands, and soon enough, the cabin is empty of water.
The ill-beaten man takes a moment to breathe. Deep breaths fill him, together with the feeling of maybe having some hope. The cabin is near pitch-black, except for miniscule streams of light coming from the top and bottom of the small containment.
“Shit, finally…” Shane mutters to himself.
The shaken young man gropes in the darkness for some sort of handle to open the door. Eventually, he finds some sort of mechanism on the high end of the left side. It’s not a straightforward door handle, so Shane fidgets with it for a while, until finally opening it.
He carefully opens the door, only to see nothing but vast ocean.
The door is tilted inwards, so it probably allows for standing on the end of the cabin floor to look around. He stands up to look, despite his body almost giving in from the pain coming from tumbling in the wave’s violence.
He sees nothing but the ocean in either direction. Either he’s been washed really far in this short time, or Osmer is…
Gone.
Shane's heart starts racing again. "Is it all gone?", he thinks.
"I wished for something to happen but… This is not what I wanted. Not at all."
The tears start running down his face, one after another. A steady stream of feelings and survivor's guilt washes through him.
Nay, rather a torrent of regret. Regret for everything he did not tell people. Regret that he didn't live a fuller life while he had the chance.
Regret that… He's the only one left…
Shane slumps down back into the cabin.
"Why was it me?" he murmurs to himself.
"Why couldn't mom live instead? Or Robert? Why not just anyone but me?".
The last man of Osmer ponders the questions, tears steadily running down his cheeks.
After some hours of lone contemplation, he is reminded again that he is hungry.
He looks around himself, the cabin seems rather empty. While moving around looking at the walls, he feels something under him creak. He moves forward a bit, just to reveal a hatch he's been sitting on all the time. He opens it and finds a box, about the size of two shoe boxes, and a big container of water, about 20 litres.
Inside the box is a 2 litre bottle of vegetable oil, multiple small packages containing some sort of hard cake, two measures, one big and one small, and a note describing how to ration the contents for one person.
Shane treats himself to a daily portion, as he already was hungry. It's not much, but the hunger quickly disappears.
He feels the boat wobbling a bit, then steadily learning towards the front. He leans out from the open door, looks around and sees nothing.
He turns his eyes to the water and sees a small wave having formed behind the boat.
"Is it motorized?" he wonders perplexedly.
"No, impossible. It's dead silent, and I can't see any bubbles in the water behind. Besides, it looks more like a wave pushing the boat, rather than forming from the movement of the boat itself."
The wave gradually gets slightly bigger until it stops at roughly 2 feet of height, giving the boat a considerable push forward. Shane is even more perplexed.
A rumbling sound is heard, shaking the boat very slightly. It reminds Shane of the sound from when he was on the boat heading for Zenith, but somehow more calm.
Sweat starts running down the forehead of Shane.
“Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, there’s a monster in the sea, now it has come to kill me too and finish the job!”
No monster appears from the sea though. The wave just keeps pushing the boat forward in a gentle, but quick, fashion.
The hours pass by.
The day turns into night, night turns into day. Shane still can’t sleep, feeling shaken by yesterday’s events.
The wave pushing the boat is a strange phenomenon, but he doesn’t mind it since it probably means that he will reach some mainland faster.
The sun is up, and Shane notices that it obviously is a new day, so he decides to eat two rations of food since he feels it improbable he will be at sea for over a month with the wave behind him.
Shane wonders where he will end up and what will happen there.
This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.
Will there be pokemon there?
Will he even be able to get a job?
Will he find any purpose with life, assuming he ever arrives anywhere?
He continues his inner monologue and the day continues into becoming night again.
Tonight he gets some sleep as well.
He wakes up from his feet becoming wet. It is raining. He realizes that he probably should close the door when being asleep, as to not fall out in a storm. Then he proceeds to sleep again.
The days keep passing by, and every day Shane eats two rations of food, never feeling too hungry thanks to the fat provided.
About a week has passed when Shane hears birds in the sky.
A light of hope is lit within him.
“Finally, there must be some land coming if there are birds here”.
He takes a closer look at the birds, and notices that they don’t resemble any birds he has seen before. Or rather, they do resemble seagulls, but their wings have much straighter edges, and their beaks are unusually large, although their body to wing ratio seems to be smaller than that of seagulls.
He peeks over the roof of the cabin, and can see a very thin line on the edge of the horizon.
“At last… Thank god, i won’t die here at sea at least” Shane thankfully thinks to himself.
Shane proceeds to sit on the roof of the cabin. He’s tired of sitting on the floor anyway and instead wants to take in the coastline to see what islands are around.
As the landmass closes in, Shane realizes that the birds in the sky are not emitting normal bird screeches. It sounds more similar to human speech.
“Wee” and “gull”, it sounds like.
There are also strange creatures in the water. They look kind of like fish and jellyfish, but much larger, and somehow more colorful.
“Are these… pokemon?” Shane mumbles audibly.
As he approaches the coastline, he can see a town, almost reminding him of his hometown on Zenith in size, but with way taller buildings.
A fisherman, middle-aged and wearing a red vest, sits at the edge of the water with his rod stretched towards the sea. He looks at Shane while the small boat closes in on the waterline. Shane looks back at him.
The boat hits some rocks with a thud, and Shane almost falls off the boat. The angler, unphased, keeps watching him.
Shane regains balance while still firmly gripping the edge of the cabin.
“That’s a peculiar boat you have there,” says the man with the rod.
Shane, unsure of what he should say, takes a couple of seconds and returns:
“Well… it works. Where am i?”.
The man furrows his eyebrows. “On Dewford. Are you lost?”.
“Yeah, pretty much. There was a… a wave. My home is gone,” Shane replies, feeling his jaw twitching and his voice becoming unsteady”.
“Oh… Where are you from, boy?” says the man in a now more concerned tone.
“Osmer.”
“Osmer… Can’t say i’ve heard of that place before. Do you need help?”
“If you… could you… I mean, yeah”.
The man stands up, folding his fishing rod together. “I know where they probably should have some better info than me on things. Come here,” says the man, now smiling, showing no pity, just a genuine smile.
Shane follows him, picking up the pace so they walk side by side.
“So, a wave you say?” the man continues.
“Yeah, I was on a boat going home, when I felt the sea shaking violently, like from an enormous explosion. I also saw a bright blue light on the horizon just before it”.
“Oh, that’s quite something”
“And then, I heard this sound. Sounded like ‘Kyooh’, from something very big and really far away”.
The man stops. He stands still for a while, his eyes gradually widening, then staring at Shane while his mouth becomes a thin line, seeming like his breath is trembling. Then he looks at Shane.
“Are you sure of this?”, says the man in a very serious tone.
“Why… yes?” Shane confusedly replies.
“Then we are going to the right place. They will want to hear of this. Just be sure you are telling the truth now, boy,” the man says, and keeps on walking.
“I will.” nods Shane.
“Now, there was a wave too, you said. Was it right afterwards?”.
“The sound took quite a while to come, but the wave came soon after that. Just a few minutes I think”.
“I see. Big one?”
“Larger than a big hill, or a small mountain”.
“I understand… I’m sorry, it must be hard to think of it so soon after”.
“Yeah… I’ve had some time thinking about it, but it’s mostly been questions. Why did it happen? Why did I survive?”
“Quite the introspective one I hear. It’s very understandable to think of these things after such an event. Fishing gives you a lot of time to think, and… even though I’ve never experienced such losses myself, some things happened.”
The two men keep walking in silence for a minute. Shane wonders if he should say something, or if the man is thinking of what to say himself.
“But of course you don’t want to hear about such things, would be selfish of me to throw those old antiques at you here and now,” laughs the man to Shane. Shane notices a small tone of nervousness in the man’s voice, but doesn't indicate that he does.
“I’m Bob, by the way.”
“Shane, pleased to meet you.”
They have come into town now.
The streets are filled with people, and walking alongside many of them are creatures that don’t quite remind of animals, yet they do. They are of all various shapes and sizes.
There’s something reminiscent of a pelican, a small creature made of grass with red and blue flowers for hands, a really large green spider with striped legs and a simple drawing of a face on its back, and even a big round… Is that some sort of bear with a beige stomach and dark blue back?
Shane asks Bob “What are all these creatures?”
Bob raises his eyebrows so high that they almost become one with his hairline.
“Never seen a pokemon before, have you”?
Shane shakes his head.
“Well, you’re in for a treat, then. The world is filled with them. Very intelligent, might I say.”
Shane wonders how it came to be to never be any pokemon back on Osmer, but he keeps it to himself.
After a few more minutes of wandering, the two men arrive at a blue building, with a sign saying “Police station”.
“Here we are, I hope you’ve got that story of yours fresh in mind. You won’t be in any trouble. We have very lenient refugee policies here in Hoenn, I believe, and they will probably want to report to the right authorities about what happened to your home. You want me to come with you?”.
Shane thinks for a brief moment. “No, I’m okay going by myself. Thank you so much for helping me”.
“No problem, kid. You know where to find me,” Bob smiles.
Shane smiles and nods back, to which Bob does the same, turns around and walks back the same way they came.
Shane turns to the entrance.
“Oh man... I really hope something good comes of this. "