I am incredibly pleased to announce that Chapter One is ahead of schedule. Once again, please be brutally honest with your comments; I want this story to improve as much as it can. ^^ Also, thanks Taylor5 and The Beast for your comments on the prologue. ^^
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Chapter One: Loneliness
Twenty years.
Nobody was entirely sure on the accuracy of this figure, but nobody dared to question it. Nothing was questioned in Hoenn these days, especially the purported length of its reign. Not that it really mattered; time lumbered along slowly and painfully nowadays.
Under this regime, there were four classes of people. The first were the Citizens: ordinary people at the mercy of the Empire, which rarely practiced anything remotely similar to mercy. Most of these would perform manual labour or repetitive office duties, and were expected to be “the hands of the Empire”.
Then there were Suits. They were fortunate citizens who the Empire had recognised as intelligent, and worked for the upper ranks of the Civil Service. Rather than destroy the intellectuals, like many other tyrannical regimes, the Empire instead made them superior members of society. This gave them a favourable inclination towards the Empire, and allowed it to be run relatively efficiently.
The third class, the Guards, were professional pokémon trainers, a rare breed these days. Guards would sadistically enforce the law of the Empire, using their powerful pokémon caught with master balls to injure and kill dissidents, and frighten the innocent into fearful submission.
However, the class of people that was undoubtedly the most feared were the Hoods. The Hoods were the elite, and dressed as one would expect the Grim Reaper to. This induced fear and a sense of preternaturalness about them, giving them psychological power over the inhabitants of Hoenn. They didn’t give speeches, nor did they even appear in public.
The faceless tyrants.
Watson Young was a fifteen year-old teenager, ready to enter the world of work. He stared out the train window, into the faint reflection of his blue eyes, excited. He, along with the others on this train, was about to begin his career with pokémon. It wasn’t how people in other regions would do so: the friendly professor, the complementary items, and the exciting journey ahead. To get a journey like that now in Hoenn was virtually impossible, what with years of paperwork and fierce restrictions on the strength of your pokémon. The last thing the Empire wanted was a group of trainers powerful enough to stand up to the Guards.
Thus, the only way one could become a trainer was to become a Guard. The two terms seemed to be interchangeable nowadays.
To become a Guard, provided you received reasonable “effort” grades at school (translatable into “level of subservience”), all you had to do was succeed in an interview. This was the Empire’s way of seeing whether the candidates are sadistic enough.
He ran his pale, slightly muscular hand through his short, light auburn hair, struggling to remember why he loved pokémon. Since a young age, he had been fascinated by them: their aesthetics, their power, and most curiously of all, he had always suspected that they would have the capacity to be friends with their trainers. This is of course contradicts the Empire’s official position that pokémon are dangerous and should only be handled by trained professionals.
People across Hoenn
knew this to be true.
Before the Empire, and for a few years after its rise to power, Hoenn’s trainers professed incredible passion for pokémon. Passion turned to respect from a distance. Respect from a distance became mild caution. Mild caution mutated into fear. All because the grip of terror that the Empire had over the Citizens was so powerful, that they found themselves truly changing their beliefs.
Fear bred fear.
Looking down at his grey, uniform dogi, he thought about what kind of pokémon he’d like. He didn’t know how much choice he’d have; choices weren’t abundant in the Empire’s regime. He couldn’t help but dream, though, of owning a growlithe. Fiercely loyal, powerful, agile: the perfect pokémon.
His uniform was temporary; as soon as he qualified to become a guard, he would receive an intimidating armour that would drown passing citizens in fear. But for now, this monotone uniform was to instill a sense of conformity within him, and the easiness of penetration was to allow the qualified Guards' strikes to him to cause maximum pain. All in all, it was to remind him that he wasn't a Guard yet; still a lowly Citizen.
Nothing now to do but rest.
Woken from their slumber, the future Guards of Hoenn were being ushered out of the train and into their new academy. Six weeks of rigorous training, simply to prepare their pokémon to become vicious killers.
He gazed upon the academy. It was a dominating, arsenic fortress, dominating over the oddly cold desert, and the air seemed to be tinted a light grey, which matched the recruits’ uniforms. The sand was dark and the skies were shrouded in menacing clouds, with nothing visible for miles upon miles: an endless, lonely crepuscule.
Two Guards directed the group of about a hundred inside. They were in full Guard uniform: a dark metal armour with their faces masked behind thinly-spaced flexible metal rods running horizontally past their faces. Master balls were immediately visible at their waists, and on their chests they bore the Crest of the Empire: a battle-scarred zangoose standing over a fainted seviper.
The room the cadets entered was bare: black marble walls and black marble floors, intensely lit by lights from an invisibly high ceiling. Silent Guards lined the walls of this circular atrium. Watson stared across the room with a silent contempt for how pointlessly large this room was; he despised things without reason. This, of course, got him beaten in his early years at school: the authorities didn’t like being asked questions. He still had the scar on his thigh from the deep gash a malicious Guard’s scyther had inflicted on him.
From that moment on, he learned that questions are best thought, not asked.
One would expect a speech before the trainers were issued their pokémon, but the Empire officials never gave speeches. Nobody knew exactly why, but the unspoken general consensus was that the Empire wanted to shroud itself in mystery. The greatest fear, after all, is the fear of the unknown.
Instead, the cadets were ushered into single file by a Guard standing in the middle of the room, with Watson at the front: the place he felt most comfortable. The Guard in the middle gave a brief instruction.
“Cadets! I will give you your houndour, and you will walk directly forward. Then, you will enter the dormitory, take the nearest bed, and unpack.”
He then gave a sharp gesture to Watson to move forward. The Guard held a small black device in his hand that materialised a master ball, containing Watson’s standard issue houndour. Watson swiftly swiped this ball with an almost greedy expression crossing his face, and rapidly proceeded to the dormitory.
Everybody was in the ebony marble dormitory, performing various actions: some reading books, others intimately looking at photos of their loved ones, and some consulting with their new weapons. The light noise was abruptly interrupted by a loud voice coming from an intercom at the end of the room.
“Lights out in ten minutes!”
Watson, staring up at the ceiling, decided that he’d like to observe his new pokémon – get a feel for it. He was one of the few that hadn’t already. It was quite odd; Watson had wanted his first pokémon more than anything, and now that he had it, he was fearful of opening it. His intuition had advised him throughout his life, against all his observations of the Guards, that he’d fight side by side with his pokémon, a true companion. Something that he’d only ever had once before in his life.
His intuition had retracted this position.
He twisted the ball in his hands, and made a split-second decision, clicking the button at the centre to release his pokémon. It was a small, black canine that was intimidating for its size. It had skeleton-like protrusions from its fur, and a fiery orange belly. Probably the perfect pokémon for a ruthless agent of a dictatorial regime. Barking its name once, it looked straight into Watson’s eyes. a determined look flaring in them.
Watson lulled his head to the side, like a curious child. What could he say to this pokémon? He couldn’t appear weak, but he didn’t want to seem abusive.
“Hello, there houndour,” Watson said in an unsure tone.
“<Is that all you have to say?>”
Watson squinted at the Houndour, as if the act would help him understand what it had just said. A flicker of amusement became apparent for a second in his pokémon’s eyes. This houndour understood that Watson didn’t understand.
“You’ll know what it’s saying when you train with it more,” a pompous voice lectured.
A short, black-haired girl sauntered up to Watson with her Houndour. Watson stared into her russet eyes, trying to decipher her intentions. Watson was naturally suspicious of others: was she trying to help him, or intimidate him with her knowledge? He instinctively brought his hands in front of his body, slowly, his right fist held in his left hand.
“Are you going to respond? A simple ‘thanks for the tip’ will suffice, you know,” she explained, thrusting the right of her forehead slightly forward.
Watson spoke his words with caution, “How long will it take?”
Shrugging, she said, “Depends on the trainer and the pokémon. You’d better hope it will be quick, because your houndour won’t be much of a fighter if you can’t understand each other.”
He immediately took a disliking to her: she was one of
them. He couldn’t expect much more, though – after all, he was struck many times for even suggesting that pokémon could be more than battlers.
The houndours, meanwhile, were having their own conversation. Or, they were for about ten seconds, after which time they began playfully tussling on the floor. The girl noticed this, and suggested a pokémon battle.
“I don’t think the Guards would be happy with us battling,” Watson noted.
“You’re afraid of the Guards?” the girl challenged.
She’d struck a raw nerve. Watson was simply terrified by the Guards. He never used to be; he had an air of defiance about him as a young child. But the taunting of the Guard with the scyther, the one that slashed his thigh open… he would never be the same again. He constantly questioned, then: why did he wish to become that which he feared?
“If you’re afraid, then,” the girl shrugged, and turned to leave, assuming herself the victor by default.
Watson wasn’t going to let himself be defeated. Not this time. She had lectured him, played on his fear, and then demeaned him, in front of several people that were watching their conversation from the moment the word “battle” was mentioned. He wasn’t going to be considered weak.
His anger channeled into his right arm, and he clenched his fist, his knuckles immediately whitening. And then, he rapidly released it into her face. She fell, a look of horror, disgust, and surprise etched into every detail in her face. He had hit a girl. Violently. And he stood there, contemplating what he had done in that second of raw anger.
And felt no remorse.
The entire room, including his own houndour, looked at him with surprise on their respective faces; a cold shock hanging in the air. Some gestured angrily, looking as if they were about to repeat Watson’s action on him. Retribution for his crime.
“Five minutes until lights out!”
Watson returned his houndour to its ball and climbed into his bed, not bothering to change into his pyjamas. Once again, he would be the outcast. Once again, others would despise him.
Loneliness.