Rigged from the Start

Specific: The human arrives in the Pokémon world too late.

…

My stepfather’s family owned a lakeside cottage; I absolutely hated it. It smelled like mothballs and mildew, and a crazy cat lady probably picked out all the furniture. Every summer was the same. My parents would sit around with our relatives, yammering on and on and on about boring shit, completely ignoring us.

The lake was always either too hot or too cold, and everything was overgrown and crawling with nasty ass bugs. Worst of all, our aunt would bring this disgusting seven-layer salad that we had to pretend to enjoy. Every. Single. Summer. And the cherry on top? Whenever we got home, we had to be checked for ticks. Our cottage fucking sucked, man.

When I was ten years old, my parents brought our bikes up north. They thought we could cycle along the roads together—bond as a family and all that jazz. Plus, they knew both my brother and I were in our ‘mobbing through the streets of our home town like we’re hot shit’ phase. Maybe then the trip would be less of a dumpster fire then. It almost worked, too.

I really loved biking. I could go wherever the hell I wanted. The weather had been perfect, crisp and clear. The road dipped and curved, and every turn felt like an adventure. I never knew what was around the corner.

Well, I did—more trees and maybe a car or two—but I could pretend otherwise. Something about the thrill of the unknown, or perhaps the idea that something strange might be out there, spoke to me during the quiet of that long, warm, sleepy afternoon. There never was, but there might be.

Of course, things went wrong, because I was, and still am, a colossal dumbass.

The driveway leading to our cottage slanted at a sharp forty-five-degree angle for a good fifty or so feet, before bottoming out into a ten-foot-tall retainer wall. Probably had been a ramp at a dirt bike course in another life. Regardless, I went down the driveway on my not-dirt bike, thinking I could brake to a stop.

(I didn’t stop.)

I barely remembered the details. Everything happened so fast. One minute Mom was yelling at me to get off the bike; the next, I was hurtling through the air toward an enormous oak tree. The wind ruffled my hair, and it felt a little like flying.

I’d closed my eyes. I wished I hadn’t, because then maybe I’d know how I wound up on the ground with nothing more than a few scratches while my bike, twisted and mangled, rested against the tree, wheel spinning haplessly.

Mom randomly burst into tears throughout the rest of the day. She’d promised beforehand we’d go biking again later (we didn’t). Everyone told me it was a miracle I’d survived mostly unscathed. My brother pitched a fit; he’d been looking forward to another bike ride.

The whole thing had scared the ever-loving piss out of me, although it would take a long while before I realized how much worse it could’ve gone. But at the same time, it was lowkey one of my favorite trips ever, because for once, all eyes had been on me.

Now, as I plummeted thousands of feet through the grey sky, the memory struck me once more. This time I kept my eyes open. I wanted to see how I’d survive.

…

It was cold. Not just cold. Fucking freezing. It reminded me of the time the polar vortex swept through our city. The temperatures had dropped as low as -40 degrees Fahrenheit. A physician assistant had been walking back to her car in the hospital parking lot when someone jumped her, beat her unconscious, then left her there to die.

They found her frozen but still alive the next day. Paramedics arrived with boiling buckets of water to melt her skin from the pavement. She died on the way to the hospital.

Kind of unfortunate, considering it was only a couple yards away. Mom’s hands wouldn’t stop shaking, struggling to open a bottle of wine, as she told me the story. It featured on the news the next day, too.

It was that type of cold. The type that made it hard to breathe. The type that made it hard to keep your eyes open. The type that made people do crazy shit.

I’d fallen from quite high up in the sky, although how I wasn’t a bloody smear in the snow was beyond me. (I’d bounced. I’d fucking bounced.) My body throbbed like the time I fought that punk Jimmy Brosner for my mile stick—I’d walked a mile and I’d earned it, dammit, he wasn’t going to take the credit from me. He put up a hell of a fight, though, and I’d felt it several days after.

At that point, I realized I wasn’t human anymore. I had scales and paws and more torso than leg and these weird things that felt kind of like a mouth-guard. I ran my tongue along the thick, smooth, annoying bumps on the inside of both my cheeks, a small distraction from the creeping numbness in my limbs.

I stood in the remains of a village. Structures shaped like strangely familiar monsters lay torn open to the elements. They reminded me of faces maimed by terrible scars, eyes staring sightlessly up at the grey sky. Wind whistled through tattered flaps of leather and broken pieces of wood.

I recognized some of the monster designs; they were Pokémon. I hadn’t thought about Pokémon in years. Jesus Christ, this was one bizarre goddamn dream.

My first Pokémon game was Pokémon Yellow. I’d been too young to really get how to play, and somehow Mom wound up beating pretty much the whole thing for me. She still told that story sometimes in the aftermath of a bad argument. It was a nice memory.

The shaking of my new, weird, dopey little body distracted me. I needed to find shelter. Fast.

I shuffled toward the large, ordinary building in the center of the town—no way was I going near those creepy-ass head tents—grateful to at least be out of the wind and snow. Upturned tables and shattered glass littered the floor and the bar. No one was here. I huddled down, still shivering, and glanced around. Now what?

(What now?)

A purple box tucked away in the corner caught my eye. With nothing better to do, I stumbled toward it. The box was locked. My paws were already clumsy and foreign, made worse by the cold. I tried to open it the good ol’ fashioned way for several fruitless minutes. Then, on impulse, I bashed my head against the box and cracked it open. Huh. Neat.

Inside rested several brightly colored seeds and berries. I wasn’t hungry, so I ignored them. There was also an ice crystal thing. Curious, I awkwardly picked it up with those grubby claws of mine. I expected it to be cold, but it wasn’t. If anything, it felt warm, pulsing like the beat of a heart.

A voice came from the crystal. I dropped it.

Clink.

The sound was loud in the abrupt silence.

I picked it up again.

“… Guess this is it, huh?” The voice was low and gruff. “Maybe it’s better this way. Already worse than useless. Makes me sad, though. All those homes I coulda built with my team and now…”

I relaxed my grip, and the voice stopped. The crystal had a ring of stones wrapped around it. By fiddling with them, I could ‘tune’ into a variety of voices like one of those old fashioned radios. I found the gruff one again.

“… I hate this. Hate that I wasted so much of my life doing absolutely nothing. Some of the best years, just gone. And I ain’t never getting ’em back. And now it seems like there’s no future, neither. I just, I just hate wasted potential.

“But that’s not even the worst part. Ya know? I dragged my buddies down with me into my pity party—it’s true, don’t bother saying otherwise, mates—and ruined any chance they had at being something more too. What kinda boss does that? What… how am I s’pose to fix it…”

And then he broke down crying. Low, deep, harsh sobs. I’d never heard any man cry like that before. They were always so stoic and silent when things went wrong.

Then I thought about all the stuff I hadn’t done yet in my life. I hadn’t had sex. That definitely sucked. I hadn’t won the fifth-grade science award, but that was because Kevin Junior robbed me, the little asshole.

I got cut from the high school basketball team after snagging a rebound, sprinting down the court, missing an open layup and slamming into the backboard. As I lay on the ground, probably concussed, everyone had stopped to stare at me, because I’d tried to score on my own team’s basket. Look, it was an honest mistake (although the coaches hadn’t seen it that way).

Once Mom screamed at me after finding out I’d been skipping Spanish class. She’d gone on and on about my lack of drive and ambition. The fuck did someone say to that? I was only sixteen, damn. Chill. And the Spanish teacher was one of those teachers, who thought they could be best friends with the students and made us do ‘fun’ projects. (Group projects are never fun, never.) Like holy shit, just give me some worksheets and let me get out with the mandatory credit I need, Christ.

It was still cold, although it didn’t bother me as much anymore.

I listened to more voices. Some of them gave names; Emolga sounded like a dude constantly hopped up on caffeine. Some of them gave names I recognized; I’d used a Quagsire in my old Pokémon Silver game. His name was Blue and he knew four water attacks. He also hadn’t come off as a potential serial killer, which could not be said for this Quagsire.

Man, I fucked with Blue, though. I loved him so much I cloned him five times through that one PC glitch. Together the goon squad and I destroyed our bitch ass rival and the Elite Four. When I got Ruby for my birthday and figured out I couldn’t do the same thing, I realized perhaps the time had come to move on.

One of the voices was soft and feminine. Her name was Virizion, whatever that was. Maybe the phone-type pokémon.

“I know things look bleak. I know that. But… I’m glad I won’t be alone. I’m glad I met everyone. It would be so much harder alone. As long as we have each other, I have hope that we can still figure this out. Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

Once at the cottage, I went kayaking with my brother. He ditched me, taking off to explore on his own. I was left alone. I just drifted toward the opposite bank. The water had been so still, clouded over with algae. And then, out of nowhere, I screamed and screamed and screamed until the neighbors came running. They found me with tears streaming down my cheeks.

I had the urge to cry now, too, for some reason. But maybe this body couldn’t cry. Or maybe it was too cold. I didn’t know; I just kept listening to the voices.

“… If you’ve found this, chances are pretty good the world’s already ended. My name’s Pikachu. I’ve been searching for something for a long time—I wanted a place where pokémon could laugh together. Feel safe together. A place where we all would trust each other so completely it wouldn’t matter if we fought. In the end, everything would be okay. True paradise… that’s what I was searching for. And then I finally found it.

“Paradise is lost. I thought I could keep hold of it forever. I thought together we could keep hold of it forever. But I guess not. Pokémon more important than me decided otherwise. It hurts to pour your heart and soul into a dream only for it to not matter in the end. It feels like nothing I’ve done has ever really mattered. I don’t want to be forgotten. I don’t want Paradise to be forgotten. I worked so hard on it… it’s not fair.

“This is my way of being remembered, I guess. It’s not much, but it’s better than nothing. Just know there was something beautiful once, even if all that’s left is cold and grey. If someone finds this, know this: here I am.”

Paradise, huh.

Sometimes I dreamed about California and the sun-bleached tetherball courts at school. We’d be in the shade playing with Pokémon cards. No one knew how the game actually worked so we just made shit up. For a game where rules were treated more like a suggestion than something that had to be followed, Jeffery still somehow almost always managed to win.

Jeffery was one of my closest friends; he lived next door and had an N64 and Pokémon Stadium. I didn’t actually like him, he was kind of a huge dick, but he had a ton of cool stuff. Then one day, I found him playing Pokémon Silver (my Pokémon Silver) and asked him if it was mine. And Jeffery, the little shit, lied right to my face.

(I did nothing.)

Eventually, I got my cartridge back. Dad apparently stormed over and demanded it back. But the damage was already done—Blue and his army of clones were gone, replaced by a lame ass totodile and one of those brown squirrel things.

Sometimes I dreamed about California and how Dad would bring us to this small, cramped condo. It was so different from the enormous home we had had when Mom and Dad were still together.

This place was squat and threatening. The carpet was worn and dirty. I kept a bunch of Pokémon cards in a metal Scooby-Doo lunchbox, and used them to play make-believe with my brother. It was one of the few times we went on adventures together, him with his trusty alien-pirate-Pikachu and me with my mobster-boss-Jigglypuff. Meanwhile, Dad went into the other room with our babysitter

Maybe California wasn’t my paradise. But what else did I have? That shitty cottage up north? Hell no.

Although I did have one good memory from there:

I was laying in the hammock watching my stepfather and my half-sister stand out on the pier together. She was still really little back then, only two or three years old.

My stepfather was this huge, tall dude and also pretty strict. He’d never been in the military, but you wouldn’t have known it looking at him. We came up with a nickname together: D.O.D. It stood for Department of Defense.

But yeah. They were out on the pier together. And my stepfather was holding my half-sister so gently despite being so goddamn fucking massive that I called out to him, and I called him Dad. He turned toward me, and the closest I’d ever seen a smile like that on his face was when he caught me watching porn once…

(God, I was such a waste of oxygen.)

And now I was walking towards the pier. It rained recently and the clouds were still clearing out. The sun was low in the sky, a deep, dark red.

Beyond the lake and over the treeline we saw a rainbow. Not just one rainbow but four of them, one larger than the rest and ringed by the other three. All I could think of at that moment was that stupid video where the guy yells, “It’s a double rainbow!” or whatever it was he said.

Suddenly I couldn’t stop laughing. Now I was walking away, toward the tree where my crashed bike still spun. I picked it up, giggling like an idiot, and returned to the pier. My stepfather and sister were gone, replaced by Pikachu, who said nothing. He just quietly stared at the rainbows.

“You know this fucking cottage isn’t even ours anymore, right?” I told him. “Stepdad finally caved and sold it. Good fucking riddance. We’re both technically trespassing though, y’know.”

Pikachu’s ears twitched.

I threw the bike into the water. We watched it sink together, watched the algae break apart then swirl back together. Shallow, standing water. Disgusting.

We jumped into the lake. It should’ve been ice cold that time of year, but instead, it was warm. Pleasant. I could drift off and sleep in water at this temperature. Maybe the cottage wasn’t so bad after all.

(In the end, I closed my eyes.)