Rating: PG
Author's Notes: Unlike most of the entries for the Small Writing Contest, I chose not to reproduce mine exactly as it was submitted. When I submitted the original, I was extremely displeased with the ending, for a variety of reasons. I wasn't able to come up with one that seemed to fit until well after the deadline for the contest. Because I feel that the new ending is much more appropriate than the original, I have chosen to display it as the main one here.
However, because I'm sure some people will prefer to read the 'fic as it was originally submitted, I have also included the original ending at the bottom of this post under a spoiler tag. The first letter of the paragraph where the new ending takes over from the old one is bolded, so if you reach that point and would prefer to go to the original ending instead of reading the one that's on there now, you can scroll down and open up the spoiler.
Other than that, the 'fic is exactly as it was submitted, without further proofreading or anything. I hope you enjoy it.
The Kanto Hall of Fame was lonely after hours. There were no school groups trooping through, jabbering and pointing out the pictures of their favorites on the walls. There were no researchers mining the archives, or young trainers come to dream of their own future here. The only lights were scattered emergency bulbs, and even the janitors had gone home for the night.
There was no movement but that of dust filtering down through the darkened air, settling around faceless stone statues from the time before the leagues, when the champion had simply been the one who had conquered all comers and seized power over the region. The great video screen that spanned almost an entire wall was dark, but on the console below it an LED blinked a green heartbeat.
A sceptile stepped from behind one of the ancient statues, yellow eyes wide as they swept over the shadowy room. Its claws were soundless on tile waxed to a mirror sheen, not even the rustle of vegetation giving it away as its leafy tail swayed back and forth behind it. And then, as it drew nearer to the front of the room, a high-pitched screech cut through the dark.
A raichu hurled itself from its perch atop a decaying granite rhydon, electricity outlining its body in a blinding halo. The sceptile had only half-turned when the electric type slammed into its side, lightning discharging with a snarl. The big lizard, although less susceptible to the voltage than most, jerked and let out a gurgling hiss as the raichu clambered between the seed pods lining the grass type's back, claws tearing at leathery skin. The sceptile hissed and twisted, razor-sharp leaves swishing through the air as it struck at the sparking rodent.
A lucky slice caught the raichu across the underbelly as the electric-type flailed for a pawhold, and it tumbled free of its perch, blood marking a long gash up its chest. But its trainer was there, standing firm amidst the statuary. "Quick attack!" he yelled, but even as the raichu was clambering to its feet, a backwards kick from the sceptile sent it skidding away across the floor.
The rodent's bolt-tipped tail stabbed at the tiles, dragging up a line of sparks as the raichu scrambled to right itself on the slippery floor. The sceptile wheeled at the call of its own trainer, spitting glowing seeds after its floundering opponent. The firecracker sound of the bullet seeds bursting against the tiles almost drowned out the next command, but the raichu's ears were sharp; its slide ended against the side of a crumbling totem, and it scrambled up the worn stone before hurling itself into another clawing, biting embrace with its opponent.
The sceptile's trainer showed no sign of fear, in spite of the fact that the man across the room from him was several years older, and a legend besides. The latest pokédex model and athletic clothing splashed with the most fashionable brand names stood opposite apricorns and a scuffed, unadorned cloak. Gabriel Arden, champion of the Kanto League, looked forward across the ages and across the floor at Rod Carver, champion of the Kanto League, and neither seemed to find the meeting strange.
The sceptile's claws slipped on the polished tile and it went down on one knee, clawing at the wiry tail wrapped around its neck. The raichu sent throbbing pulses of lightning rattling through the lizard's body as the grass type thrashed and wheezed in terror—
And then the raichu was flying through the air again, lightning-bolt tail blazing with energy as it slammed an iron tail between the sceptile's shoulder blades. But this time the lizard turned, claws closing around the whip-thin tail, and swung the raichu over its head before hurling it away and into another of the statues. The electric type, dazed and twitching, toppled to the floor—
Or there had been no iron tail at all, and the raichu launched a mega kick at the sceptile's flank, only to be met with a downward-sweeping dragon claw. The electric type shrilled with pain and fell back. Too weak to respond to its trainer's call, the raichu was engulfed in a howling column of solar energy—
Only to become a hulking arcanine, embers dribbling out around its teeth as it watched the sceptile step back, hissing and flaring the leaves on its wrists. And it wasn't Gabriel who stood against Rod, now, but Marianna Forthright, champion of the Kanto League, tall and pinched-looking in an antique dress clearly not meant for the field of battle. A fine mist of rain spattered the worn monuments and pokemon alike but the trainers, just beyond, were untouched.
The blaze of light from the arcanine's first attack revealed a crobat whirling and flitting near the ceiling, stalked by a fearow on silent wings. Below, two furret wound between the statues, rushing into fits of clawing and biting and then breaking apart again, circling for advantage in the gloom. Beyond that, a machamp wrestled a golem, and still further on, a venusaur snared a dragonite in creeping, leeching vines.
In among them were the trainers, of all ages and sizes, all races and all times. The champions of Kanto stood rank on rank between the statues, commanding their pokémon against one another in battle after battle, tireless and undaunted as the night stretched on. They were all here, the revered and the reviled, from last year's top dog to those represented as no more than crude outlines once gouged into the ancient stone that ringed the plateau long before the modern league was built here, their names and pokémon no more than fragments and guesswork glued together by myth and song.
Beneath them all electricity hummed, machinery whirred; the console light blinked its excitement as it watched the battles unfold. Some of the champions were well-known, like Edward Fairholt, indicted for stuffing his team full of illegal performance enhancers, or Veronica Elswood, who clung to her title a full ten years in a row, far longer than any before or since. But they were the few, the brightest stars in a crowded firmament—who would remember Alex Davis, unremarkable in all but that he was Kanto's champion a hundred and twenty years ago? Or Merlin Torel, who took the title only because his opponent overslept and failed to appear for the match?
There was one who knew them all, and more than that besides—knew their history and their foibles, traced the rise and fall of Kanto through the fashions its champions wore and the ever-expanding stable of pokémon that they used to win their place. It gave a little introduction to the hall to any visitor who stepped before the console, and the schoolchildren always laughed and pointed at its cartoon-swirl eyes as it bobbed around on the big console screen, stuck their arms out straight and flailed them around in imitation of the little oblong extensions protruding from its sides.
It answered all the old questions: "Who was the first female champion?" Elizabeth Floredel, crowned in 855. "What was the shortest championship match ever?" The battle between Ernest Vendrig and Wilson Scott in 904. It lasted two minutes and nineteen seconds before a wayward icicle spear struck Ernest in the chest, killing him and making Wilson the winner by default.
But there were the questions, too, that they never thought to ask, and perhaps thought could never be answered. What if Ernest and Wilson had taken their match the whole way through? Who would have won? What if Evan Dulherst hadn't told his camerupt to explode in the third round, but saved it instead? If you pitted the best battlers of today against those one hundred, how would they measure up? Who was the greatest of the greats, the true champion among champions?
The caretaker asked these all and more, and on unused processor cycles, in quiet hours of the night, it played out its holographic dreams, watched Kanto's finest test themselves again and again, against a hundred different opponents, in every circumstance imaginable. Sometimes it constructed elaborate terrain out of the pictures of the old Indigo Plateau or the trainers' homelands buried deep in its memory banks: places it would never see, never know of as more than a footnote to so-and-so's greatness. Sometimes, though, they raged through the only place the caretaker had ever been, the hall that was its only real home, and the statues were joined by flitting digital ghosts, their struggles and triumphs leaving no marks in the dust filtering softly to the floor.
What had they hoped for, these men and women who carried the thread of leadership down through Kanto's generations? They were fighting for fame, for money, for immortality. But humans were fickle and their attention short; some names lived on long past their times, but more often than not, even these, who had gone so far to grave their names on the pages of history, acquired the greatest honor Kanto could give, had faded into no more than the briefest mention in obscure books of history.
There was one who would not forget, who looked on all with loving eyes and hoarded all that it knew about them, arranging and re-arranging the facts with the passion of a fervent collector. For a creature with no future, there was nothing to do but build a life out of the past, observing the champions as they battled opponents they never could have dreamed of, their pokémon forever by their side in battle.
And, most every year, there would be a new one added to the flock: eager and almost fainting with joy, they'd stand for a picture with their pokémon, slide pokéballs into the console's slots to let the data on their teammates be read. New biographical information was poured into memory banks, images inserted for cataloguing and admiration. The caretaker sifted through it all, reformulating models, calculating statistics. And, not too much time later, the new champion would join their peers in the unending dance of battle, rising or falling in favor as they matched up against centuries of Kanto's best.
Night wore on towards morning, and gradually the shades of humans and pokémon began to thin out, those who lost their matches retreating back to the depths of digital memory. But there was one trainer who walked the floor and did not fade, who trounced even the most powerful champions with ease. Its form was blurred and fringed with static, its sex indeterminate, but by its side there always hovered a porygon-z. The two of them scoured the floor with preternatural skill. Every trick, every strategy that the other champions tried against them was turned aside, and opponent after opponent was overwhelmed, their weaknesses exposed, their gambits turned back against them. How could they win against one who knew their every detail, who had spent a lifetime studying the minutiae of their greatest battles?
At last there were none left but the porygon-z and its trainer, standing before the long case displaying championship trophies awarded here over the ages. There were images of these and more tucked away in the depths of the caretaker's brain, usually pictures of them being clutched in the hands of some ecstatic young trainer just beginning to realize what he or she had done. With time even the simulacrum of a trainer fell to pieces and only the porygon-z remained, hovering before an array of trophies that, while it held them all in its mind, it could never even reach out to touch.
The pokémon remained there, alone, until the lights came on and somewhere far away the gates of the league complex ground open. The new day invited a fresh batch of living souls, wrapped up in the bright, urgent certainty of their lives, to wander through the halls of those whose lives were long past, and those who had never really lived.
Author's Notes: Unlike most of the entries for the Small Writing Contest, I chose not to reproduce mine exactly as it was submitted. When I submitted the original, I was extremely displeased with the ending, for a variety of reasons. I wasn't able to come up with one that seemed to fit until well after the deadline for the contest. Because I feel that the new ending is much more appropriate than the original, I have chosen to display it as the main one here.
However, because I'm sure some people will prefer to read the 'fic as it was originally submitted, I have also included the original ending at the bottom of this post under a spoiler tag. The first letter of the paragraph where the new ending takes over from the old one is bolded, so if you reach that point and would prefer to go to the original ending instead of reading the one that's on there now, you can scroll down and open up the spoiler.
Other than that, the 'fic is exactly as it was submitted, without further proofreading or anything. I hope you enjoy it.
Valhalla
The Kanto Hall of Fame was lonely after hours. There were no school groups trooping through, jabbering and pointing out the pictures of their favorites on the walls. There were no researchers mining the archives, or young trainers come to dream of their own future here. The only lights were scattered emergency bulbs, and even the janitors had gone home for the night.
There was no movement but that of dust filtering down through the darkened air, settling around faceless stone statues from the time before the leagues, when the champion had simply been the one who had conquered all comers and seized power over the region. The great video screen that spanned almost an entire wall was dark, but on the console below it an LED blinked a green heartbeat.
A sceptile stepped from behind one of the ancient statues, yellow eyes wide as they swept over the shadowy room. Its claws were soundless on tile waxed to a mirror sheen, not even the rustle of vegetation giving it away as its leafy tail swayed back and forth behind it. And then, as it drew nearer to the front of the room, a high-pitched screech cut through the dark.
A raichu hurled itself from its perch atop a decaying granite rhydon, electricity outlining its body in a blinding halo. The sceptile had only half-turned when the electric type slammed into its side, lightning discharging with a snarl. The big lizard, although less susceptible to the voltage than most, jerked and let out a gurgling hiss as the raichu clambered between the seed pods lining the grass type's back, claws tearing at leathery skin. The sceptile hissed and twisted, razor-sharp leaves swishing through the air as it struck at the sparking rodent.
A lucky slice caught the raichu across the underbelly as the electric-type flailed for a pawhold, and it tumbled free of its perch, blood marking a long gash up its chest. But its trainer was there, standing firm amidst the statuary. "Quick attack!" he yelled, but even as the raichu was clambering to its feet, a backwards kick from the sceptile sent it skidding away across the floor.
The rodent's bolt-tipped tail stabbed at the tiles, dragging up a line of sparks as the raichu scrambled to right itself on the slippery floor. The sceptile wheeled at the call of its own trainer, spitting glowing seeds after its floundering opponent. The firecracker sound of the bullet seeds bursting against the tiles almost drowned out the next command, but the raichu's ears were sharp; its slide ended against the side of a crumbling totem, and it scrambled up the worn stone before hurling itself into another clawing, biting embrace with its opponent.
The sceptile's trainer showed no sign of fear, in spite of the fact that the man across the room from him was several years older, and a legend besides. The latest pokédex model and athletic clothing splashed with the most fashionable brand names stood opposite apricorns and a scuffed, unadorned cloak. Gabriel Arden, champion of the Kanto League, looked forward across the ages and across the floor at Rod Carver, champion of the Kanto League, and neither seemed to find the meeting strange.
The sceptile's claws slipped on the polished tile and it went down on one knee, clawing at the wiry tail wrapped around its neck. The raichu sent throbbing pulses of lightning rattling through the lizard's body as the grass type thrashed and wheezed in terror—
And then the raichu was flying through the air again, lightning-bolt tail blazing with energy as it slammed an iron tail between the sceptile's shoulder blades. But this time the lizard turned, claws closing around the whip-thin tail, and swung the raichu over its head before hurling it away and into another of the statues. The electric type, dazed and twitching, toppled to the floor—
Or there had been no iron tail at all, and the raichu launched a mega kick at the sceptile's flank, only to be met with a downward-sweeping dragon claw. The electric type shrilled with pain and fell back. Too weak to respond to its trainer's call, the raichu was engulfed in a howling column of solar energy—
Only to become a hulking arcanine, embers dribbling out around its teeth as it watched the sceptile step back, hissing and flaring the leaves on its wrists. And it wasn't Gabriel who stood against Rod, now, but Marianna Forthright, champion of the Kanto League, tall and pinched-looking in an antique dress clearly not meant for the field of battle. A fine mist of rain spattered the worn monuments and pokemon alike but the trainers, just beyond, were untouched.
The blaze of light from the arcanine's first attack revealed a crobat whirling and flitting near the ceiling, stalked by a fearow on silent wings. Below, two furret wound between the statues, rushing into fits of clawing and biting and then breaking apart again, circling for advantage in the gloom. Beyond that, a machamp wrestled a golem, and still further on, a venusaur snared a dragonite in creeping, leeching vines.
In among them were the trainers, of all ages and sizes, all races and all times. The champions of Kanto stood rank on rank between the statues, commanding their pokémon against one another in battle after battle, tireless and undaunted as the night stretched on. They were all here, the revered and the reviled, from last year's top dog to those represented as no more than crude outlines once gouged into the ancient stone that ringed the plateau long before the modern league was built here, their names and pokémon no more than fragments and guesswork glued together by myth and song.
Beneath them all electricity hummed, machinery whirred; the console light blinked its excitement as it watched the battles unfold. Some of the champions were well-known, like Edward Fairholt, indicted for stuffing his team full of illegal performance enhancers, or Veronica Elswood, who clung to her title a full ten years in a row, far longer than any before or since. But they were the few, the brightest stars in a crowded firmament—who would remember Alex Davis, unremarkable in all but that he was Kanto's champion a hundred and twenty years ago? Or Merlin Torel, who took the title only because his opponent overslept and failed to appear for the match?
There was one who knew them all, and more than that besides—knew their history and their foibles, traced the rise and fall of Kanto through the fashions its champions wore and the ever-expanding stable of pokémon that they used to win their place. It gave a little introduction to the hall to any visitor who stepped before the console, and the schoolchildren always laughed and pointed at its cartoon-swirl eyes as it bobbed around on the big console screen, stuck their arms out straight and flailed them around in imitation of the little oblong extensions protruding from its sides.
It answered all the old questions: "Who was the first female champion?" Elizabeth Floredel, crowned in 855. "What was the shortest championship match ever?" The battle between Ernest Vendrig and Wilson Scott in 904. It lasted two minutes and nineteen seconds before a wayward icicle spear struck Ernest in the chest, killing him and making Wilson the winner by default.
But there were the questions, too, that they never thought to ask, and perhaps thought could never be answered. What if Ernest and Wilson had taken their match the whole way through? Who would have won? What if Evan Dulherst hadn't told his camerupt to explode in the third round, but saved it instead? If you pitted the best battlers of today against those one hundred, how would they measure up? Who was the greatest of the greats, the true champion among champions?
The caretaker asked these all and more, and on unused processor cycles, in quiet hours of the night, it played out its holographic dreams, watched Kanto's finest test themselves again and again, against a hundred different opponents, in every circumstance imaginable. Sometimes it constructed elaborate terrain out of the pictures of the old Indigo Plateau or the trainers' homelands buried deep in its memory banks: places it would never see, never know of as more than a footnote to so-and-so's greatness. Sometimes, though, they raged through the only place the caretaker had ever been, the hall that was its only real home, and the statues were joined by flitting digital ghosts, their struggles and triumphs leaving no marks in the dust filtering softly to the floor.
What had they hoped for, these men and women who carried the thread of leadership down through Kanto's generations? They were fighting for fame, for money, for immortality. But humans were fickle and their attention short; some names lived on long past their times, but more often than not, even these, who had gone so far to grave their names on the pages of history, acquired the greatest honor Kanto could give, had faded into no more than the briefest mention in obscure books of history.
There was one who would not forget, who looked on all with loving eyes and hoarded all that it knew about them, arranging and re-arranging the facts with the passion of a fervent collector. For a creature with no future, there was nothing to do but build a life out of the past, observing the champions as they battled opponents they never could have dreamed of, their pokémon forever by their side in battle.
And, most every year, there would be a new one added to the flock: eager and almost fainting with joy, they'd stand for a picture with their pokémon, slide pokéballs into the console's slots to let the data on their teammates be read. New biographical information was poured into memory banks, images inserted for cataloguing and admiration. The caretaker sifted through it all, reformulating models, calculating statistics. And, not too much time later, the new champion would join their peers in the unending dance of battle, rising or falling in favor as they matched up against centuries of Kanto's best.
Night wore on towards morning, and gradually the shades of humans and pokémon began to thin out, those who lost their matches retreating back to the depths of digital memory. But there was one trainer who walked the floor and did not fade, who trounced even the most powerful champions with ease. Its form was blurred and fringed with static, its sex indeterminate, but by its side there always hovered a porygon-z. The two of them scoured the floor with preternatural skill. Every trick, every strategy that the other champions tried against them was turned aside, and opponent after opponent was overwhelmed, their weaknesses exposed, their gambits turned back against them. How could they win against one who knew their every detail, who had spent a lifetime studying the minutiae of their greatest battles?
At last there were none left but the porygon-z and its trainer, standing before the long case displaying championship trophies awarded here over the ages. There were images of these and more tucked away in the depths of the caretaker's brain, usually pictures of them being clutched in the hands of some ecstatic young trainer just beginning to realize what he or she had done. With time even the simulacrum of a trainer fell to pieces and only the porygon-z remained, hovering before an array of trophies that, while it held them all in its mind, it could never even reach out to touch.
The pokémon remained there, alone, until the lights came on and somewhere far away the gates of the league complex ground open. The new day invited a fresh batch of living souls, wrapped up in the bright, urgent certainty of their lives, to wander through the halls of those whose lives were long past, and those who had never really lived.
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