Secret People

Author's note: I know, I know. This is the third fic I'm working on right now, but as I got around to writing it, I'm also posting it. I can't force myself to write something if I actually want to write something else, so... I'm getting this out of my system, bit by bit, so that I can write my other fics with ease.

Also, if someone wants to beta this, I'd be more than happy to make you my beta readers. I'm no good with punctuation and although I proofread thrice, some of my spelling mistakes always escape me... VM or PM me if you're interested!

Warning: Ahem. I'd say this is PG-13 or something like that, because this includes some violence, some killing, physical traumas, mental traumas and some romance. And something along those lines.

IMPORTANT: This is a sequel to my first fic, Journey to Isle of Jade. However, this is a stand-alone sequel! Events and plot in this fic have nothing to do with the previous one, only the main characters are the same, so you don't have to read the other one first. The characters are precisely the reason I'm doing this. I love Cimi, Adan, Radeem, Pichu and the rest, so I'm writing another story for them to appear. This doesn't mean the plot is weaker. I think this one has a better plot than the last one, but I might be wrong. Read for yourself.



Table of contents:
Opening: On a Stormy Night
Part 1: The Lost Mind *newest*
Part 2: Sanity, the Final Frontier
Part 3: Cimi's Deal
Part 4: The White-haired People
Part 5: Secret People
Part 6: Declaration of War
Part 7:
Part 8:
Part 9:


Opening: On a Stormy Night


The winter was coming, so it was raining all the time at the mountains. The air was humid and the raindrops unbelievably freezing. The ground was constantly muddy and covered in small puddles here and there. All in all, fall was a very unpleasant time at the mountains, expecially for fire- and ground-type pokémon. That was precisely the reason Randall Meiga had built his fire-type breeding center up on the mountains. Growing his pokémon in a tricky environment like this made them more resistant to water-type attacks later on. He was very strict in training the fire-type pokémon he later sold, but the pokémon were always very proud of their background. He wasn't too strict, though: he didn't keep his pokémon outside during the rainy season. Instead, he took advantage of the enclosures being empty and had his employees fix fences and do other chores that could not have been done if the pokémon were in the enclosures.

It had been relatively dry during noon, so Randall's niece had gone to inspect one of the furthest enclosures. She had left on foot, because she was afraid what a sudden downpour might have done to her rapidash, Radeem. When she was halfway to the enclosure she was meant to inspect, she noticed that dark clouds had started to appear on the horizon.

"I'll make it back before those clouds reach the mountains," she mumbled to herself and accelerated her walking a bit. She tried to run for short distances, but she couldn't run for long because of her injured lung. A couple of months ago she had been shot with a strange metal thing called gun and it had almost killed her. Although she had survived, her lung would be permanently injured. The injury didn't affect her normal breathing, but it nearly banned her from running at all. She ran almost immediately out of breath if she tried to do anything too physical. So, she gave up on running and settled for a fast walking pace. The clouds kept on chasing her.

Meanwhile, her mother Rebecca and her best friend Adan - who also worked at the breeding center or ranch as they called it - had arrived to the central building of Randall Meiga's breedery. They had been on a trip to the closest city, Salt City, to buy the food for next week. When they learned that the girl had gone to inspect the enclosure, they were both shocked.

"Why did you let her go?" asked Rebecca in despair. "You know she's not well, with her lung and all, and you let her go in this dreaded weather?"

"There wasn't a single dark cloud on the sky," Randall explained. "Besides, she's been better lately..."

"No, she hasn't," Adan claimed. "She coughed blood again last night."

Hearing this, colours escaped from Randall's face. "S-she didn't tell me that," he said with a quivering voice. He turned his pale face away from Rebecca and Adan and looked out from the window.

It had started to get dark outside, partially because sun had started to set and partially because the dark clouds had invaded the whole sky. It had already started to drizzle.

"We've got to go find her," Rebecca wailed. "No rapidash is going to go out in this weather. She'll freeze or suffocate to death before we can reach her!"

"There is one rapidash who'd do it any time," Adan said and left the room to get the said rapidash: Radeem.

The girl had finally gotten to the small enclosure. She was getting annoyed by the dark clouds above her, partially because they had been so much faster than she thought. She was exhausted and out of breath, but she decided to inspect the fences anyway. She would not leave before she had done what she came for, no matter how heavily it started to rain. Otherwise the whole long, hard trip had been in vain. No, she would not give up. She would inspect the enclosure.

After her duty was done, it had already started to rain. She coughed a bit and looked at the sky. It didn't look like the rain was going to end soon. She started her long journey back to the central building, mad at herself because she hadn't taken Radeem with her. If she had ridden on Radeem, she'd already be back. Now she had to walk on the freezing rain. She shivered a bit while she walked. After a few steps, she coughed again, this time a bit harder.

"Oh, dear," she sighed. Minutes felt like years when she walked on. The rain got worse by the minute, and so did her cough. She wrapped her scarf around her neck so that it also covered her mouth. She put her hands deep in the pockets of her coat and walked on in the muddy ground.

It took many more minutes before Adan and Radeem reached her. They first saw her as a small silhouette. They both felt extremely relieved at first, but as they got closer, they also got more worried.

"Cimi?" Adan yelled when he was close enough to be sure the girl heard him. the only answer he got was coughing. "Stop there, Cimi, we're coming to get you!"

When there were only ten meters left, they saw how she collapsed. She fell on the muddy ground, still coughing as she laid there.

"Cimi!" Adan shouted and jumped off the rapidash as soon as they were close enough. He ran to the girl and lifted her upper body from the muddy ground. A tiny stream of blood came from her mouth, but despite all the coughing, she was still conscious. She looked at Adan and then at Radeem, her muddy face ashen.

"They're watching me," she whispered, looking absolutely terrified. "Help me, Adan!"

With that, she fainted.

Ooh suspense!
Although I never did finish Journey to Isle of Jade, which I should now, I fortunately read enough not to be left in the dark here.

Despite my short coming of not finishing the first fic of this pair, I understood well enough what was going on, and I wasn't lost in the least or totally going "wtf" to myself. Overall, I didn't notice any grammarical errors or spelling mistakes. The story flows pretty well, and I kept my interest from start to finish of this chapter. All in all, good job, An-chan!

Edit: And being the dweeb I am, I also just noticed the "stand alone sequel" part-- my comments still stand though, so HA! *fish-slapped*

Some fixes for you-(correct on the right)

Expacially – especially
Attacs- attacks
Backround- background
Employees- employees
Coulds- clouds
Altough- although

After her duty was done, it had already started to rain. She coughed a bit and looked at the sky. It didn't look like the rain was going to end soon. She started her long journey back to the central building, mad at herself because she hadn't taken Radeem with her. If she had ridden on Radeem, she'd already be back. Now she had to walk on the freezing rain. She shivered a bit while she walked. After a few steps, she coughed again, this time a bit harder.

Click to expand...

Just like Dgexe said, I think your prologue is entertaining enough to make me want to keep reading.

This has caught my attention.

I loved Radeem and Cimi in the first story and I think it will be great to have them back. After the corrections that were pointed out, I did not notice anything particularily wrong, or whatever. "Un"fortunately, I read the entirely of Journey to the Isle of Jade so I can't provide what I would call a "fresh" view of this work, but that's good because, as I said, I love to have your characters back.

Also it's interesting to see Cimi still struggling with her health after the events in the aforementioned fic. It's a good starting point when compared with all those 10-year old wannabee trainers with oustanding health and Arceus' godly touch starting their journeys.

I don't have time to actually Betaread (and I'm not that experienced yet as to try) but I will provide some pointers if I'm lucky enough noone has done it before. :D

Thanks for the extra fun.

Damn. I hoped there would be more than this, as I just finished Journey to the isle of Jade (I think that's the name) and can't wait for more!

Phew! Sorry it took so long to write the first chapter... There was some slight problems with the plot, but they're all fixed now. I didn't want to start writn gbefore it was definite what's going to happen here, so it really took a while... But here it is. A bit short, but that was how it was supposed to be.


Part 1: The Lost Mind


Adan sat in a park near the Salt City University Hospital. The trees around him were beautiful in their fall colours; it wouldn't be long now before they'd start sheding their bright red, orange and yellow leaves. Not too long after that, there would be snow. Adan sniffed and lifted his scarf to cover his mouth. It was already very cold outside around this region of Voitto. Salt City was situated high on the mountains, so summer there was short and the rest of the year cruelly cold. It was a wonder that the biggest city in the whole Voitto was situated here. Not that Adan felt like he was in a very big city anyway, since the area around the hospital was covered with lovely parks and research facilities.

Beside him on the bench sat Cimi's Pichu, he, too, wearing a scarf. Pichu was just so much smaller that the scarf was more like a jacket to him. He sniffed as well, but for a whole other reason than Adan. Pichu often acted like a tough guy, even though he was actually very emotional and naive. He was especially emotional when it came to his trainer, Cimi. His worst nightmare seemed to be her death. That nightmare had been dangerously close to becoming reality several times now, many of them during the last three weeks.

"I still don't get it. What's wrong with Cimi?" he asked with a small, miserable voice.

"We don't know yet," Adan answered. "It's probably her lung injury again."

The reason why Adan understood Pichu's words - even though he didn't know Pokéspeak - was currently dancing under the fall-coloured trees: Gardevoir. She whirled around and danced with the fall leaves like she had done most of the past three weeks they had spent on the hospital grounds. Still, she never forgot to telephatically translate Pichu's words for Adan. Not even though her mind was in turmoil: she knew, just like Adan knew, that this was no longer about a single lung injury. They had both hoped that Cimi had a concussion or maybe a high fever or something like that. But now, after three weeks, it was apparent that Cimi wasn't simply suffering from a concussion.

She had completely lost her mind.

The doctors had thought she had suffered brain damage when she had collapsed, but all the tests and scans they had done clearly showed her brain was functioning just like it should have. In a matter of days, she had been appointed a personal psychiatrist. The psychiatrist ran his tests on Cimi, but couldn't tell what had suddenly made her so delusional and paranoid. She seemed to be suffering from schizophrenia, but she hadn't had anything even remotely resembling the symptoms before, nor did mental illnesses run in her family. Yet now all she could talk about was "them" and how "they" were watching and chasing her or some other nonsense. She also didn't recognize many of the people close to her. The psychiatrist was as baffled as the doctors had been.

"She must've seen something traumatizing," the psychiatrist said. "That's the most plausible explanation for a sudden effect like this. We should wait for a while and see if she gets any better."

The most awkward thing about Cimi's mysterious mental illness was that she almost completely refused the company of anyone close to her. She didn't let her family in her room, she was nervous whenever she knew they were in the same building with her and she begged the doctors not to tell them about her condition. She didn't accept Adan in her room, either, except for the times when she didn't seem to recognize him at all. Adan had seen her mother cry more than once. Her parents were completely baffled on what they should do. Their daughter was clearly insane, and they had no idea what to do about it. Adan didn't blame them for that.

One person who Cimi gladly let in her room was her little sister, Rora. Rora was currently on her Pokémon journey, as she had been for several years already. Her aim was to beat the Elite Four of Voitto, but that was not an easy task. She had already tried twice, but she had lost to the first E4-member, Jeff, both times. On both times she was told that no-one beats the Elite Four of Voitto without at least six years of training. Rora now had four years of training behind her, but she had put her quest on hiatus when she heard about Cimi's sudden illness. She seemed to have been reclutant to do so: every time she was with Cimi, she kept on whining about having to visit the hospital and how she "had been on the verge of a breaktrough and might already have grass type pokémon resistant to fire if it wasn't for her stupid big sister". Seeing as how she was the only member of Cimi's family to be able to go into her sister's room, she didn't have much choice. Their parents used Rora as a spy, and she clearly wasn't happy about that.

Adan had noticed that Rora was, in all possible ways, the complete opposite of her big sister. Cimi had reddish brown hair, brown eyes and tanned skin, but Rora was pale, blonde and green-eyed. Also, when Cimi was pretty plain-looking and did not have a very noteworthy face, Rora was actually rather beautiful. She was a person who could catch people's attention. And, even though Cimi was very impatient in her own right, Rora was twice as restless and way more stubborn, whining whenever something didn't go the way she had planned. Thus, Rora was a bit tiring to be with.

The wind was very cold and very strong as it sweeped trough the hospital's park and pushed itself trough the fabric of Adan's coat. Being born and raised in a much warmer area, Adan didn't care much for the weather up in Salt City and the mountains. He felt sorry for Pichu, who had no shoes nor mittens on, so he grabbed the small pokémon and held him in his lap.

"Look," Pichu said suddently, "Rora is coming!"

Adan winced. Pichu loved Rora simply because of her noble aim to beat the Elite Four, but neither of them cared much for her constant complaining. Seeing as how her parents were busy dealing with Cimi's case, Rora didn't really have anyone else than Adan and Pichu to complain to, and she took the opportunity to do it really often. Now she was probably on her way back from seeing Cimi. If that indeed was the case, then she'd have a whole lot of complaints on how she always had to run on all sorts of errands and Cimi just laid in her bed. As Adan watched Rora approach, he realized that this wasn't going to be an ordinary day. Rora was running, which she never did, and she had a strange expression on her face.

When she was close enough for Adan to hear her, she opened her mouth. "Adan, hurry! Cimi is acting weird!"

"What? How?" Adan stood up so fast he almost dropped Pichu.

Gardevoir immediately teleported next to Adan, giving him a startle. She nailed her ruby eyes on Rora and tried to sense her toughts. "I do not like this," she whispered partially to herself, partially to Adan and Pichu.

"It's more like she's acting normal again", Rora huffed and slowed down. She had completely run out of breath and she gasped for air as she leaned to her thighs. It was hard for her to speak when she breathed so heavily. She looked up at Adan. "She's back to her normal self, I mean. Hurry up, she wants to see you."

Adan's heart skipped a beat and his mind went blank. Cimi was back to normal? He didn't believe it was actually true, but he had to see it with his own eyes. He started running while squeezing Pichu to his chest a tad too tightly.

The first good sign was that Cimi's parents were in her room, her mother in tears. When Adan approached Cimi's bed, she first seemed to be unconscious. Then, she opened her eyes and looked at him.

"We'll go and talk to the doctor," Cimi's dad said and left the room with his wife.

"Try to be fine when we come back, honey," Cimi's mother whispered to her daughter before closing the door.

For a moment, the room was silent.

"How are you feeling?" Adan asked Cimi and put Pichu down on her bed.

"Fine, considering the situation," Cimi answered and hugged Pichu, who was crying his eyes out. She also smiled to Gardevoir who stayed on the background, as usual. Then, she looked at Adan with a serious expression. "Adan, something has invaded my head. I don't know how it got there, but I know it's there and it's pretending to be me! I don't know what it is, but I don't think it's human... Just now it just suddenly gave the control back to me! I really don't like this at all."

Adan had to sit down in amazement. He never thought Cimi had permanently lost her mind, but what else could this be? Was she actually back to normal now or was she still just as insane as she had been? He opened and closed his mouth a couple of times before he could say anything. "You do realize that makes no sense, right?"

"Yes, that's why I didn't tell this to Rora or my parents, but I figured you'd believe me," she said, looking a bit sad. "After all, you've been trapped in a pokémon's body before."

"I'm not sure if I do believe you - yet," Adan said, trying not to sound too doubtful. "Could you explain some more?"

"All right," Cimi said and turned away from Adan. She leaned her head to her pillow and closed her eyes when she started talking. "On that day, when I went to check on that enclosure and it started raining... I felt so sick I thought I was going to die. I couldn't stop coughing and breathing had become very hard. Suddenly, I couldn't breath at all and fell down... At that time, it came. I'm pretty sure it had been waiting to attack me, really. Something attacked me and settled in my head, and suddently I had lost all control over my body. The thing took over and started asking me questions I had to answer. I'm pretty sure it's some sort of pokémon... It's not a human, it has a weird mind. It's been pretending to be me, but I can't tell what it's up to! It's subsided now, but it's still in my head and I'm sure it'll take over again..."

"Okay then," Adan said after a short while. "What should we do about it?"

Gardevoir looked troubled, trying hard to concentrate. "I can't reach it... It doesn't let me in to see its intentions."

"What? Are you trying to get into my head, too? It's crowded enough as it is, thank you!" Cimi sounded a bit annoyed. Gardevoir flinched and looked up to her.

"If there is something there, how are we going to get it out?" Adan repeated his question.

"If it's a pokémon, it's probably a ghost type," Rora said suddenly. Adan and Cimi both turned to her. They had completely forgotten that she was in the room, and she probably knew that. She smirked before continuing: "I've spent quite some time getting familiar with all kinds of pokémon, but I've never seen a psychic type do something like that. The only other option is a ghost type. They're known to posess people on rare occasions."

It was so quiet that Adan's blinking was almost audible. "So, your analysis is that a ghost pokémon is fooling around with her head," he summed up what Rora had said.

"Something like that," Rora nodded, clearly proud of herself. "Of course, it could also be a very powerful psychic type, but I still think a ghost type would be a more likely culprit if there really is some pokémon in her head. Anyway, I know a ghost type specialist who lives in Marjoram Town. Maybe we should take Cimi to see him."

"Isn't that a bit risky? With her weak health and everything, I think that's too much of a risk," Adan disagreed.

"Well, maybe. There might not even be anything extra in her head," Rora said, shaking her head.

Suddenly, Cimi smiled. It was her normal smile, the smile she almost always had on her face. "If?" She said and snorted. "I let her tell you all that by herself but you still didn't believe it? What a letdown!"

Pichu quickly jumped away from Cimi and the rest stared at her in disbelief. Had she gone back to the way she had been the last three weeks? What precisely was going on?

"There indeed is a pokémon in her head," she said, closing her eyes, "but I think it's in your best interest not to try and get rid of it. Who knows what it might do when it's angry!" Everyone was still way too shocked to say anything, so after a brief silence, Cimi opened her eyes and continued talking with a challenging. "Although, I have to say... You can go to that specialist in Marjoram Town all you want. It won't do you much good."

"Wh-what the hell? What's going on?" Adan whispered mainly to himself, but loudly enough for Cimi - or the pokémon talking trough her - to hear it.

"What's going on?" She smiled at Adan. "That's for you to find out, Adan." Her smile looked exactly like it had looked on any normal day before the accident. There was no real way to tell if it was really Cimi speaking or the supposed pokémon. There was no real way to tell if she was just completely insane or if there actually was something in her head, taking control over her body. The smile was her regular smile, she looked just like the Cimi Adan knew, yet he felt like there was something discusting about her face. The feeling was tearing him apart.

Suddenly, the smile was completely gone. Cimi looked at her best friend and little sister in the eye pleadingly. Her expression was terrified. "I'm scared," she whispered, begging them to believe her.

"All right," Adan muttered. He shook his head. "All right!" He yelled with a depressed voice. "Let's go to that specialist!" He then turned to Rora. "But you have to explain this to your parents and the doctors and everyone." He looked at the smiling Cimi swiftly before leaving the room in a very noisy manner.

"Why do I have to do the crappy parts?" Rora whined to the door, but could hardly hide the excitement from finally getting some action again.

Meanwhile Adan was walking down the stairs of the hospital, stomping as he went. He couldn't believe what he had just seen and heard. He knew it would haunt his dreams for a while, but he couldn't help but to fear something far worse was coming up. For the months he had known Cimi, she had been his most trusted person and the spine he never had. He felt oddly vulnerable when Cimi wasn't there to boss him around and obsess about the weirdest things. If she was, in fact, insane like everyone - including Adan himself - believed her to be, she would probably never return to her old self. If she was sane and there was a pokémon in her head like she claimed, there was a high chance they could drive the thing away somehow.

"Please let her be sane," Adan whispered to himself. "Please let her be sane!"