Chapter Text
Leaf had been staring so long her eyes were beginning to ache. Given that it was well past midnight, and the curtains were closed anyway, all she could see was black. She knew, though, that what she was actually staring at was the popcorn ceiling just above her aunt’s guest room bed.
Hers, now.
She’d only visited her aunt once before, when she was four.
She’d slept on couch cushions laid out on the floor of this room, her aunt’s storage room-cum-guest bedroom, with just enough room for a double between all the wardrobes and chests, and she’d had a sheet and a throw blanket to keep her warm. Her parents had to be so, so careful when they went to bed—had to creep over her, to get to the mattress, without waking her up or—even worse—stepping on her in the dark.
Her parents had been alive, then.
Her mom had died first.
Aneurism, the doctors had told her father. Nothing that he could have done.
That hadn’t stopped him from blaming himself, from believing that if he’d just gotten home sooner—
It had been Mrs. Garcia who had taken her straight to the hospital. Pulled her out of class and everything. She’d gotten the call from one of Leaf’s neighbors—probably Mrs. Stewart, she was nosy like that—and figured out what needed to be done immediately.
Given that she happened to be the school’s front desk lady, getting it done hadn’t been much trouble.
Mrs. Garcia had taken her hand, led her out of the classroom, into her car. Leaf had buckled into the backseat—without even a car seat, because Mrs. Garcia’s children were grown—and on the way to the hospital Mrs. Garcia told her that something very bad had happened.
That it was okay for Leaf to cry.
Later, when it became clear that her father was in no condition to think of anything but the hand which he’d held until the orderlies had forced him away, put a blanket over her face, Mrs. Garcia had taken Leaf to her house, and Leaf had slept in the guest room that day too.
But that had been a guest room, when she’d slept in it.
This—
She supposed this was now her room.
She blinked at the ceiling.
She wasn’t crying; she’d been crying for days, and had no water left.
Her mouth was parched, actually, and her eyes were so sore, they ached like a pulled muscle.
Her nose still burned, though.
She hadn’t thought dad would die too.
He’d held strong for her, after mom.
He’d started working night shifts. He’d be back at home every morning, with just enough time to see her off, make sure she’d brushed her teeth, and then he’d do the chores and eat and whatever else, and then he’d sleep.
He had an alarm that went off when it was time for her to come back from school, and then he was up again and helping her with homework and cooking dinner and tucking her in bed, where she would read until she was tired.
And then it was time to work again.
He worked very long shifts.
He’d been coming home from one of those shifts, driving down the highway with his windows down, and he’d heard a scream.
He’d stopped.
He only owned a Machop. Almost everyone—everyone over thirteen, anyway—owned at least one Pokemon; it was too useful not to. But he’d had no talent for training, and the Machop had no interest, and so instead they acted as manual labor.
(Mom had owned a Skitty. When she died, it had gone to Aunt Mable—her mother’s sister, her new guardian—but it died less than a year later. Pokemon without their trainer tended to die quicker, in years instead of decades.
(Grief, Leaf assumed, had done its part there too.)
He owned a Machop, and he released him as he pushed into the woods, and they’d found a girl, someone on their walkabout, in the middle of an aggressive Spearow flock.
Dad had done his best.
He’d called for help, before he went in, and the rangers had come as quickly as possible—
It wasn’t enough.
Dad’s Machop was dead. So was the girl. So were her two Pokemon.
So was dad.
Leaf had decided, that very day, that she would be a trainer.
That had been two weeks ago.
Now she wondered what she had meant.
Did she want to be a gym-type trainer? The amounts they could make if they won were absurd, but they also had to deal with all of the issues of being a celebrity. Dad watched the Indigo League every year, even if he had to tape it and watch it weeks later, and he would always root for the trainers from their area, too, but he also said that he felt bad for them, because the magazines that lined the checkout counters at the grocery store were full of gossip about gym trainers, and her dad thought it was awful to get that little privacy.
There was also the option of becoming a ranger.
That was probably the most direct response to what had happened.
Except she hadn’t wanted to be a doctor when her mom died, and the rangers had done their best, were never going to be able to get there in time for everybody.
Still, it was an option. Probably a good one, too.
But Leaf wasn’t sure if the military nature of rangers appealed to her.
Kanto didn’t have a military, after all. That was the deal with Johto—both would lose the army.
Rangers were the closest they were allowed to keep, and so they had, over the years, become increasingly military-like in their organization, in their way of dealing with things.
Leaf wasn’t sure she wanted to be in the military. The idea of all that unquestioning obedience galled—her mother, before her death, had always encouraged Leaf to ask questions, to not take things at face value.
Researcher, then?
If so, Pallet Town was a convenient place for her aunt to live.
While Pallet Town was primarily built on the fishing industry, just as Leaf’s previous home had been built around factories, Pallet also held the lab of Professor Oak, who had been a world-renowned name since he’d been in his twenties.
Leaf didn’t actually know how long ago that was, but he had white hair, so it had to have been a long time.
She learned about him in science class, in history class, and she knew that he’d changed the world dozens of times over, would probably continue to do so in the future.
Of course, being a Researcher also came with all sorts of issues—trying to pay for it, mostly.
Researchers spent years in school, and nobody in Leaf’s family was that kind of rich.
She didn’t have any answers, probably wouldn’t for a while, but her mind was finally starting to get to that special sort of sloggy where even worries weren’t enough to keep her awake.
She blinked, staring into the blackness, and tried to forget, for the moment, that this was her room.
Finally, blessedly, she fell asleep.
.
She asked Aunt Mable, the next day, about Professor Oak. Her Aunt Mable had no idea what he was like—the man was often away, as far as she could tell, and he certainly didn’t do his shopping at Bargain Basket like she did. But, she’d added when she realized that Leaf wanted more, his lab did accept visitors.
So, with hastily scrawled directions in one hand and a water bottle in the other (she was now quite certain she’d gone to bed far too dehydrated, and her aunt had some old ones from when she was more active stored in the back of the cupboard), Leaf set off.
There were, to her relief, two boys about her age hanging out near the entrance when she arrived. They were arguing about something, and the black-haired boy was becoming increasingly upset, but they quieted before she could hear what they were fighting about.
“Hey,” the blond said. “I’m Gary. He’s Ash.”
“I can talk for myself!” Ash squawked.
Leaf had to concede that was true. He was very loud.
Ash jumped the few steps down to meet her, standing just close enough for her to want to step back. “Who are you?”
Gary—hopping down alongside him—jabbed him with his elbow, and Leaf got a sinking feeling. These boys were dressed in a lot newer clothes than she was, and they were a lot more boy-ish too. Perhaps approaching them wasn’t the best idea. “Shut up,” the blond hissed at Ash, forcing him to step back with the same elbow.
“What? Why?”
“I’m Leaf,” Leaf said.
Gary jabbed Ash in the arm again. It didn’t work. “I don’t recognize you. Did you just move here?”
“Yes,” Leaf said.
“How old are you?”
“Twelve.”
“Cool!” The dark-haired boy seemed to mean it, too—the grin practically spanned his entire face. “We are too. We don’t get new kids very often. Did you come to tour the labs? Or meet Gr—Professor Oak?”
“Yes,” Leaf said, untensing. “I’m interested in studying Pokemon when I grow up, and my aunt says the lab allows visitors.”
“Are you visiting your aunt then?” Ash asked.
Gary spoke over him: “Well, I’m Gramps’ grandson—I mean, Professor Oak’s grandson. Come with me and I’ll show you where you get a visitor pass, and then I’ll show you the really cool stuff.”
“You never offered to show me really cool stuff!”
“You’ve seen it all, nimrod! Come on, follow me.”
The lab was huge, but she’d seen that from the outside. It had had a large lawn out in front, the kind only rich people did—all grass and nothing else. It even had the pretty little lawn mower lines that Leaf associated with mansions.
The building was wide and deep, too, but managed to not look too much like just-a-big-box. Leaf had the distinct impression, walking up to it, that some architect had been paid a lot of money to achieve that feat.
The inside—starting in the large atrium, which stretched up four floors in wasted space—was equally vast.
“It seems bigger than it actually is,” Gary said once he’d noticed her expression. “While normal-sized labs work fine in most cases, for research on larger Pokemon, larger labs are needed.”
“Yeah, and then there’s the cafeteria and all the storage space.” Ash, trailing behind them, added. “And the pastures in the back, to hold even more Pokemon.”
So, massive then.
Leaf already had a good impression of both, from the short time they’d spent chatting while she’d been scanned in (which took a surprisingly long amount of time, actually. Apparently, according to Gary, science theft was a really big issue). She knew that the boys were far wealthier than she, that they attended a private school, that Ash’s dad was Red while Gary’s was Blue—and if those weren’t household names, then nobody’s were—and that they were growing up in Pallet Town because their moms thought it was important that they keep a sense of normalcy at least during the holidays.
Neither lingered on their fathers in their explanation, though Leaf knew both were still alive. Leaf didn’t ask.
She did, however, appreciate how they’d given up their fathers’ names to her. It was visibly not something they did often, but given that Gary clearly knew what had brought her to Pallet Town, and would no doubt tell Ash once she was out of earshot, he must’ve thought it was a fair trade.
So she felt she had a pretty good—both as in accurate and as in positive—impression of them both, but she was also increasingly aware of just how much their reality did not align with hers.
Before she could give that another thought, however, Gary pushed open a door to—
“Woah,” Leaf said. There was nothing else to be said.
Gary’s grin could be heard in his voice. “Amazing, isn’t it?”
Rows and rows and rows of Pokeballs, each and every one of them containing a Pokemon—you could tell, because the living metal Pokeballs were made for always bulged when they were in use, not-quite-doubling in size, and these Pokeballs were large.
“I mean—” Leaf said.
“I know,” Gary said. He grabbed her hand, pulling her down a central aisle. “Admittedly, these are the cheap Pokemon—Magikarp and Rattata, mostly—that are used for most experiments, but the sheer quantity…”
“It’s amazing,” Leaf said.
“What’s amazing,” Ash said, moving to walk alongside them, “is that your grandfather won’t give us any of them.”
“Oh, you’ve got special dispensation to start training early?”
“Well, no.” Ash admitted. “But our fathers were ten when they were allowed to start training, and they ended up winning the Championship back-to-back when they were twenty-one!”
“When your dad was twenty-one,” Gary corrected. “Mine was twenty.”
“But that just makes my point more! What’s changed in twenty-five years, that we can’t just leave today?”
“The law,” Leaf pointed out.
“Exactly,” Gary said.
“Oh, don’t you pretend like you haven’t been begging Professor Oak too!” Ash said. “You just gave up quicker.”
“Well, maybe I’m more mature than you.”
“Maybe you’re just a give-r up-er,” Ash countered.
Leaf grinned. She’d never had any brothers, but she knew plenty of classmates who did, and this sort of back-and-forth was exactly what brothers acted like. Still, if they were sniping, then she probably wasn’t going to be learning anything new, so…
“Where are we going now?” Leaf asked. Gary was, after all, still pulling her forward.
“We’re going—” Gary paused, turning at a break in the rows and gesturing to a biometrics-locked door. “There!”
“Oh, that’s boring,” Ash said.
“No it isn’t!”
“Yes it is! We’ve been there loads!”
“Leaf hasn’t!”
“Oh, right.”
Gary, apparently feeling that he no longer had to yank her forward, let go of her hand and went to the door, with Leaf and Ash following after.
After a minute or so—Gary had to get his face scanned, provide a thumbprint, and then type in a password while Leaf and Ash turned around—the door slid open.
More Pokeballs.
“Get in, get in!” Gary said. “The door only opens for thirty seconds at a time.”
“Are these separated because they’re more valuable?” Leaf asked.
“Got it in one,” Gary said. “There are loads of these rooms lining the walls of the main room, but this one’s my favorite.”
“It has the foreign Pokemon,” Ash piped in. “And Gary only wants to use foreign ‘mon.”
“I don’t—” Gary stopped. Rephrased. “I just think that, when we do start gym battles, it’s going to be a lot harder for opponents to plan for foreign Pokemon, compared to natives. Everyone knows how to battle a Pidgeot, but what would you do if I sent out a Kilowattrel?”
Leaf tried to remember which Pokemon a Kilowattrel was, or at least which region it was from, then gave up. “Send out an electric-type?” she suggested, purely on the basis of Pidgeot being a Flying-type.
Gary laughed. “Exactly! And since Killowatrel is part electric-type, my bird will take it and hit back no problem!”
“I still think you aren’t giving Kanto-natives enough credit,” Ash said. “They’re super strong, and you’re just ignoring them!”
“How about you,” Gary asked. “Are you going to try to get foreign ‘mon or stick to native ones?”
“Well,” Leaf said (even though she still didn’t know if she was doing the gym challenge at all, not even the three gyms required to earn the right to own more than three Pokemon) “I can’t really afford to purchase Pokemon, so I guess I’ll just stick to Kanto.”
Ash whooped, but Gary blushed. After a second, Leaf realized that it hadn’t occurred to him that money would be prohibitive to most trainers. Gary coughed, turning to the back of the room where a computer sat. “Anyway, I like to come here and find out what Gramps is trading with other Researchers.” The three of them moved forward, and Gary gestured for Leaf to take a seat. “Go ahead. I’ll lead you through how to look it up.”
After a few seconds—the UI was thankfully pretty intuitive, and Leaf had spent a lot of time at her old school’s computer lab already—the database was in front of them.
“This is amazing,” Leaf said. “Look at all the stuff that’s already known about them!”
Each entry contained the Pokemon, region, location caught, parental data if available, weight and other biometrics, known move sets… the more she clicked, the more came up.
“Yeah, it’s great. Wait, go back to the database screen—yeah, okay, now scroll down. No, too fast. Okay… okay… bit further… there! Click that one!”
“Magnezone?” Leaf read aloud. “I haven’t heard of that Pokemon.”
“Right, right,” Gary agreed, “but you have heard of Magneton?”
Leaf shrugged, nodding. “Yeah. The factory my mom worked at used them to conduct electricity, actually. Plus, they were functional battery storage.”
“Yeah—” Gary cut himself off. “The factory used Magneton for that? Not Magnemite?”
Leaf nodded. “Yeah. Pokeball factory. Needed a lot of electricity.”
“Oh, that makes sense. Anyway, the point is, Magnezone is, like, this incredible insanely rare Pokemon, and no one knew quite how they, you know, evolved, except that they only ever evolved at Mount Coronet, but then a trainer from Sinnoh went over to Unova, and while they were in this other mountain—Chargestone Mountain—their Magnezone evolved, so then a bunch of scientists starting looking into it, and this is the very first Magnezone which evolved through the simulated magnetic field that it apparently needs because that was what Mount Coronet and Chargestone Mountain had in common!”
That…
That was actually really interesting. “So soon anybody will be able to evolve Magneton?”
Gary’s smile wavered a bit. “Well, no. Most Magneton in the simulated field still don’t evolve, and the simulated zone is actually very expensive to keep running.” Then Gary’s smile brightened again. “But! Now that we can simulate it, we can study it easier, and figure out why most Magneton don’t evolve! In both the simulated and the real magnetic fields, I mean.”
“That’s really cool,” Leaf said, and she was about to ask another question—specifically, about why Oak Laboratories had the Magnezone—when Ash groaned.
“We’ve been in the Pokemon warehouse forever, and it’s freezing here!” He turned to implore Leaf directly. “Don’t you want to go look at actual, real Pokemon? The hatchery is expecting their Charmander clutches to hatch sometime this week, and we can go see if that’s started!”
Leaf turned to look at Gary, who shrugged. “Worth a shot. Gramps seemed pretty sure it would be late in the week, but breeding’s not his expertise; this is just something some of his grad students are doing.”
“Great!” Ash said. “Let’s go!”
The grad students let them in easily enough (though the one that did immediately went back to his desk and didn’t address them again), so Leaf supposed Gary must have more-or-less free run of the place.
The Charmander eggs—there were two batches, from a Charicific Valley nest and a different Kanto-native nest (location redacted), because the grad students were trying to figure out why the Charmander population had been declining in Kanto in recent years—were, unfortunately, not hatching. They were being kept plenty warm, however, and a cool device consistently and constantly rotated them in place.
“What’s that for?” Leaf asked. She tried to keep her voice down—the grad students were still hard at work.
“That’s to keep them moving. In the wild, most Pokemon mothers, and sometimes Pokemon fathers, will move the eggs pretty frequently. Not all the time, or anything, but enough so that the eggs know they are safe. If you look inside an egg which hasn’t been moved in a while, you can tell that the Pokemon has, like, paused in growing. Then if you move it again—and it’s warm enough—it’ll start growing again.”
Ash squinted at the eggs. “I still don’t know why Charmander eggs are yellow,” he said. “Most eggs are the same color as their parents, and Charmander eggs… aren’t.”
Gary shrugged. “I dunno either.”
“Well, you could ask,” Ash pointed out.
“I’m not going to ask!” Gary snapped. And then, lowering his voice even more, “And neither are you. They’re busy, okay? Let’s just—let’s show Leaf one of the training rooms instead.”
“Yeah, okay.” Ash agreed. “Let’s do the Rattata racing room. I like that one.”
The Rattata racing room was just that—a rather large room with a racing track about a meter away from each wall.
And there, on the track, were racing Rattata.
Again, the scientists paid them no mind. Here, at least, they were allowed to be a bit noisier. “So why are they racing?”
“My Gramps wants to figure out how fast they can go,” Gary explained. “And figure out if there’s any part of their genetic code—or, ideally, something easier and quicker to test—that tells you which Rattata will be the fastest beforehand.”
“Oh,” Leaf said. “Like how some humans are really good at running and others… aren’t.” It wasn’t that she was bad, necessarily—she was actually pretty coordinated, and her endurance was decent, too. She just… wasn’t fast.
“Exactly!” Gary said. “If we can figure out which Pokemon are best at what ahead of time, then people can get Pokemon that fit their needs. Like, a factory doesn’t need a fast Magnemite—they aren’t going anywhere. But a trainer does, because speed matters a lot in battles. And Rangers tend to like their Pokemon able to take hits, so they would get Magnemite who can do that.”
Leaf wondered how expensive the ‘good’ Magnemite would get. Magnemite were actually relatively cheap right now—her dad said—because, while some were great battlers, most just weren’t. If you could tell beforehand, however, which ones could be great—well, the chance that she could get any of those ones at all would disappear.
She did not say any of that out loud.
There were Rattata to watch, and bets to be made about which lane would win each race (and bets to overhear the scientists making too), because dad always believed gambling was a great way to pass the time so long as you didn’t risk much, and none of them were risking anything, and by the time Leaf had to leave to get back home in time for lunch she’d been invited back the next day, when the boys were planning on learning how to ride a Mudsdale.
When she went home, and told her aunt a very summarized three-sentence story of the day, and asked permission, Aunt Mable smiled. “If it gets you this talkative, then of course. And I trust Oak—he’ll have safeguards in place before he lets his grandson try to ride some random Pokemon.”
Leaf hadn’t considered that.
She hoped her aunt was right.