[Pokémon] Nice to Meet You [PG; short story]

Disclaimer: Uh... nope, I still don't own the Pokémon Franchise. All OCs are mine, however. This short story is set into parts, since it turned out being longer than I had originally expected. And it's rated PG for possible minute amounts of cursing.









The sun was just slipping behind a curtain of thick trees when the old truck rounded the bend in the road. It wasn't often that cars travelled between Petalburg and Oldale, especially with the young and inspiring trainers wandering around, but as long as the headlights were on and the motor roared, everything probably should've been okay.

In the least, the fellow in his late 30's riding shotgun hoped everything would turn out fine. He had enough worries on his mind without having to consider a hit-and-run in his very near future. The passenger's name was Raphael Drakeson, and he had an important undertaking on his hands.

To most people who were given first impressions, Raphael emitted the vibes of one's typical bookworm. Black plastic-framed glasses sat before a pair of eyes that were nearly the same shade of green as the suit he wore. By comparison of the portly driver to his left, he was skinner, although not unhealthily so. Long orange hair was pulled back into a tight ponytail. His face was somewhat thin and pointed with prominent cheekbones; and when he smiled, his lips tended to curl up into a humble, small show of pleasantness. One would probably find him buried in books more so than smiling at people, however. It only made sense, given the simple fact that he was Canalave's assistant librarian.

So what had brought him across a large stretch of water to the land of Hoenn? Despite his current profession, the matter what awaited the man in Oldale had little to do with popular books or ancient tomes or volumes written by philosophical hikers. It pertained to one simple matter: family. Raphael had to admit to himself that where family was concerned, he had never really hit things off perfectly like he had with his beloved books. In fact, familial matters were characteristically ones he had been excluded from and thus did not pay attention to as the years dragged on.

This affair, he had decided a few months prior to the present day, was an entirely different situation that required his interest. And as far as he could see, it was still an entirely different situation and hopefully would continue to be such for many years to come.

"What's bringing you to little old Oldale?" the driver suddenly spoke up, jarring Raphael from his thoughts and causing him to nearly drop the small wooden box cupped in his hands. The driver, whose name he couldn't recall presently, gave him a few seconds to collect himself for an answer.

"I'm… I'm going to celebrate a family member's birthday, sir. It's tomorrow," he politely (and quietly, the driver noted) answered. Sensing that his passenger probably wasn't going to elaborate without some prompting (Raphael had been rather silent during the past fifteen minutes of driving), the portly man continued the conversation with, "And which family member would that be?" Raphael fidgeted in his seat due to a sudden wave of anxiousness and felt more comfortable with staring at the box.

"That…" There was a mildly uncomfortable pause, during which a new wave of uneasiness overcame the passenger. He had to take a few extra seconds to recover enough to answer. "That would be my niece you're asking about." The driver's curiosity suddenly peaked, and he could hardly stop the words from tumbling out.

"You're not on the best of terms with her?"

Raphael swallowed thickly and leaned back into the worn leather behind him. "No sir," he continued in that polite, soft voice, "We've never met before."




His words had been the simple truth. Raphael had never met his sister's daughter in all her sixteen (now going on seventeen, he reminded himself) years of life. After all, family matters were the sort of thing he didn't occupy his time with actively, if at all. On the other hand, his sister would every few years send him a letter about what was going on in her life, and this particular niece sometimes had a few lines of mentioning in the page somewhere. Katrina didn't describe her at length; the girl apparently had her eyes but her father's hair (and his height), and she was a Pokémon trainer.

Alright, so Raphael had a niece in the family tree. That fact alone, considering his usual front of staying out of the family affairs, usually wouldn't prompt him to cross oceans just to meet her on her birthday. His other elder sister was married with children, and he had not once met them and had no plans on doing such a thing.


This was entirely different, as the assistant librarian had noted on several occasions previously. Katrina still contacted him, despite it taking a few years to receive replies to his own letters. She still kept some very small slice of familiarity with her brother. She still let him in on important events in her life, albeit being as vague about them as the woman possibly could do. Katrina was the one to inform him of this mystery-niece he was related to. The trainer had once again been mentioned in the last letter to arrive in his mail box.

That was perfectly normal. Just as he did every time he received a new letter, Raphael would read through it. Katrina had talked about how the Hoenn league was holding up, about how her life as a stay-at-home mother and wife was going, and that her husband had finally gotten a promotion to bank manager in the neighboring city of Petalburg. And then Katrina had started talking about her daughter. Raphael remembered in particular that this part of the letter had taken up a good paragraph or two longer than it normally had, and one line in particular had stuck out in his mind.

She's turning out to be like you.

Most uncles would probably be pleased to know that their nieces and nephews were taking after them. Raphael was quite the opposite of this sentiment. Every fiber of his being told him that he didn't want his niece to end up like him, and deep down he knew her parents felt the same exact same way. Now, he wasn't a particularly bad person; he had a fine enough paying job he enjoyed, he had enough friends to keep him company, and while he had no children of his own it was safe to say that the assistant librarian still possessed a kind-hearted streak to him around them. Such details might've struck others funny that Raphael didn't want his niece to end up like him. But it must be understood that Raphael's family tree and its inner workings simply weren't like most families.


Quite a few generations before Raphael's, the Drakeson clan had allied with three other families across the known world with a single common goal in mind: produce four powerful families of psychics. At the time of its creation, the patriarchs of the four clans had found the idea to be very good. They'd all go down in history as producing generation upon generation of talented psychic warriors, soldiers, and closer to the turn of the century, psychic Pokémon trainers and coordinators. Such a task included intense training of each individual's abilities, and at least two volumes of traditional rules each family abided by had been produced to keep everything in its "proper place". After all, the patriarchs of each clan for the last few hundred years wanted to keep their "family orchid" clean.

But every tree has its "bad apples"—the unwanted, disgraceful crops that didn't fit in with what the families considered to be normal. Raphael, to his misfortune, was one such product. For a variety of reasons, may it be possible inbreeding or simply ill-fortune, he had not developed an inkling of anything psychic and, according to his father, never would no matter how long he lived. That made him akin to roughly ninety-five percent of the current human population (let alone the various non-Psychic Pokémon). He was a perfectly normal human being and a productive member of society. But that wasn't what the clans, especially his own, wanted. They didn't want non-psychics polluting their special little gene pool. Raphael's father had long ago severed his branch off of the family tree to keep things pure.

He did not want the same fate to befall his sister's child.



"Hey, mister, where do you want me to drop you off?" the driver inquired, jarring Raphael from his reflections for a second time that evening. Quite literally blinking back into reality, the passenger looked around to gain a sense of his bearings so he could give a proper answer. From the looks of the lamp-lined street, flanked with small local businesses and the occasional house, they had indeed arrived in Oldale—the main street, to be more precise.

"This town has a Pokémon Center, yes?" When the driver nodded, Raphael sighed to himself and carried on, "Then I suppose that will be the best place. Thank you once again for the ride, sir."

"Heh, it's no problem. Lucky for you I was headin' out this way. It'd be a long, lonely walk otherwise. The center is just down the road here," the burly man explained, motioning with one hand towards the left side of the street. "We'll be there in a minute or two." Raphael inclined his head in acknowledgement and settled back into his seat once more. Hopefully finding his sister and brother-in-law's residence would not be difficult.


Twenty minutes had passed since the man in the pickup truck had dropped his passenger off and had departed south for Little Root. He had bid Raphael a good evening and good luck in meeting his niece. The nurse working the night shift had courteously pointed him in the direction of Katrina's home. Fortunately, Oldale wasn't a large town and the walk proved to be shorter than expected.

Raphael turned onto the forth road branching from the main street and quietly began to count out the house numbers. The home he was looking for had been one of the first ones built, so fortune was on his side that he only had to walk a few yards down the street before the two-story home came into view.

It wasn't a very grand house, but it did look to be at least fifty years old, if not older. A small garden made up a majority of the front yard with a predominantly western feel to it. Several berries and flowers circled around a patio table and matching chairs of black iron. This didn't surprise Raphael in the least; Katrina and her husband were of European decent. Obviously they had worked the garden up into their own tastes. The gate around the perimeter of the yard unhooked and swung open without a hitch, and slowly the man began to approach the front door of the house.

Only now did anxiety begin to get the best of him. Lights were on in the windows, signaling that it wasn't unoccupied, and Raphael had not a clue as to who was home. The situation he was putting himself in would prove highly awkward no matter who answered the door, and his largest fear plaguing him now was that he would be turned away. Whether or not that included some sort of "holier than thou" berating, he really couldn't be certain; but that would only feel like salt being applied to deep, old wounds if it did occur.

For a few moments, he stood in the yard's flagstone pathway, contemplating if this entire ordeal was really a good idea. To his surprise, it really didn't take too long to find an answer. Oh this is just ridiculous, the man thought to himself after a few seconds of standing there like a ninny, Just get it over with. With his mind irresolutely made up, the man trudged the rest of the distance to the front door and reached out with one slightly-shaky hand to ring the doorbell. A shrill ring alerted the residents of their visitor, and a few seconds later the door opened up.

"… What are you doing here?"

Samuel Wilhelm, Katrina's dearly beloved, stood in the doorway in nothing more than a pair of flannel winter-time pajamas and a thick bathrobe about his lean shoulders. The slightly shorter man owned gaunt face covered in stress-induced wrinkles from which a pair of blue eyes began to glare holes into Raphael's face. Short, slicked back brown hair with a receding hairline graced his crown. Thin lips were pulled back tight into a displeased line, and one twitch of a muscle would probably bring Samuel very close to grimacing.

"I, uh… h-hello, Samuel," Raphael greeted his brother-in-law as cordially as possible. Samuel's mere presence had a very good way of making him feel rather inferior; it was ironically fitting, as his own father was just as good at the exact same thing.

"I asked what you are doing here, Raphael," the other man repeated with a touch of venom to his voice. "Last I heard, you're still expelled from the Drakeson clan."

"Well, um, it's... yes, that's correct, Samuel. That's still my status, and—." Raphael halted abruptly as the thinly-veiled venom that was coating his brother-in-law's words now spread to his face. Samuel's patience was already wearing thin. "Y-your wife, she… she informed me in one of h-her letters a few months ago t-that my niece's birthday is tomorrow." He carefully pulled the wooden box from his coat pocket. "I-I brought her a gift."

"Oh? Did you now?" One bony hand slipped from under one of the banker's crossed arms and was held outstretched to hold the box in question. Obediently, Raphael dropped it into his possession and watched with the air of a scolded schoolboy as the lid was carefully opened up. The inside of the medium-sized vessel was lined with burgundy velvet, and nestled inside of it was a rounded stone. The porch lights reflected off of its turquoise surface like the shine of light upon someone's eyes. Samuel recognized it immediately. "Ah. An evolutionary stone," he remarked neutrally as the box was gently shut and returned to its owner. That was about the time when someone else walked in on their conversation.

"Dear? Who's at the door?" Samuel and Raphael both looked up at the tired, feminine voice, and a mixed expression of surprise appeared on the latter's visage. Katrina had moved off of the couch, curious as to why her husband was still at the door with a visitor. She was the female "splitting image" of her younger fraternal twin with matching green eyes and orange hair, but to Raphael's surprise she had gained a few pounds in her adult years. It hardly helped matters that the nightgown she was wearing presently only added on more years and less flatter to her figure. On second thought, she seemed more like the female "mirror image" of himself if that mirror had a few cracks running down it.

Katrina stared at Raphael with an expression of astonishment, which was then followed rather quickly by disappointment. They had not seen each other in years, and the only way Samuel knew who was at the door was thanks to that cracked-mirror-image the siblings shared, on top of Raphael's father having once explained that his son was the bespectacled of the pair. Raphael now felt even more like a scolded school boy under that gaze. Samuel turned away from him to quietly explain to his wife what exactly was going on, and her look of disappointment began to slowly warp into pity.

"Oh, Raphael, you… you really came all the way to Hoenn just to give a birthday gift?" she asked as if she truly couldn't believe he'd go out of his way to be some part of anything familial, especially where his standing with the family was in the first place.

"Yes, Katrina, I did."

"That's certainly considerate of you," Samuel remarked, "but our daughter won't be home for another week."

"… Excuse me? Another week?" Raphael gave the husband and wife before him a mildly puzzled look. "But her… her birthday is tomorrow. Y-you said so in one of your letters, Katrina—."

"—I know what I wrote in my letters, Raphael," his sister quickly responded. "She's being delayed by a few days in Johto. I assure you, she…" Katrina faltered for a moment, and Raphael slowly narrowed his eyes in thought. "…will be back in a week." Raphael held up his free hand to stop her from speaking further as the box was finally tucked back into his pocket.

"You don't have to keep lying to me, you two. I understand." He turned to walk down the porch stairs, away from his sister and brother-in-law. "You don't want me to meet her or interact with her," he continued to call back over his shoulder. Samuel held a neutral expression upon his face, although underneath it he was smiling like a serpent. Katrina continued to look pitiful and rather pathetic. "She'll be back by tomorrow, if not late tonight, but don't worry. I'll be on my way to Petalburg again, having never come into contact with her. Good night."

Without another word between the two parts of the broken family, Raphael walked out of the Wilhelm's yard and turned the corner to head back to Main street. Those old wounds in his heart had begun to sting again.