Pokemon: The Road to Absolution

Chapter 2

Well, he wasn't going into the tall grass - the path was laid out ahead of him and he had no plans to deviate from it.

It wasn't going to be fully dark for a while. The sunlight was bleeding away to a dilute red.

Nathan reflected on the rhyhorn returning to its pokéball. He felt his gut try to strangle itself. In all his earlier haste, he didn't even know if the Pokéball he had taken even contained anything!

What if after all of that running, he didn't even have any pokémon inside of the ball to begin with? The professor would have surely tried to call Nathan's mom immediately after he had noticed the missing ball. Oak had their house number, he was sure.

And yet there had been no phone call.

Nathan stewed in his panic, slowing his walking pace. A bearded giant of a man, wearing tough-looking hiking boots, strolled past and grunted by way of greeting. Nathan lifted his head but barely acknowledged the man.

What if the reason Oak didn't call was because he knows that none of his pokémon have gone missing? What would he care if it were only a cheap, easily replaced, hollow device that had disappeared from his desk? He probably didn't even notice. That's why he hasn't done anything.

Nathan lifted the pokéball and watched it quiver in his open palm. He checked that the hiker was some distance away, to save him from further embarrassment.

He thumbed the white, circular button and it gave a monotone whine as the ball became the size of a large apple.

He shut his eyes and launched the ball towards the gritty trail in front of him. He heard an explosive sound like a tennis ball being smashed inside of an empty stadium, followed by a roaring like the waves of a rough sea.

He felt the ball being drawn back into his limp hand like an ascending yo-yo and he gripped it tightly. He felt the two halves swinging on their hinges and snapping to a close.

He opened his eyes.

An enormous turtle stood to attention in front of Nathan. It had its reddish-brown eyes fixed on him with a stony gaze, the wide mouth set in a hard line. Two canons of slate grey were reaching out of the dark crevices of its bulky shell. The belly was light brown like an eggshell and looked to be made of several lines of tough scales.

"Blastoise," it grumbled, in a voice that sounded like the gurgling of a sinkhole in the world's deepest bath.

All Nathan could do was stare, half of him fighting to stop his jaw from crashing to the floor, the other half feeling his stomach flood with warm relief.

"Oh, wow," he finally gasped. "You're a little bit better than a charmander, aren't you?"

Blastoise said nothing. Its only response, at least in Nathan's imagination, was to offer a slight swell of its bulky chest. Nathan racked his brain for information on this round giant.

Let's see, this one's a water type, I know that much. Let me try to recall some water type moves.

Nathan had religiously watched the Pokémon League Special every evening on television when he was a young boy. In it, two trainers would do battle in a gigantic stadium. Each battler was allowed to have six pokémon. The fights would feature commentators for the benefit of the audience at home.

Nathan remembered being only inches away from the square television set, the static build-up from the screen lifting wisps of his fringe. His mother had berated him a couple of times for sitting so close. He wanted to lean forward and sink through the glass to end up in the stadium itself. He swam in the memories for a short while, a water type move at last bubbling to the surface of his mind.

"Okay, Blastoise," he commanded, trying to lower his voice an octave. "Use hydro pump on that tree!"

He jabbed a finger at it as though hoping to spear the bark with his intent. Blastoise leaned forward slightly, shifting the position of its round and clawed feet to anchor its weight.

Two sapphire, pulsing cylinders rocketed out from the top of the canons. Nathan, even at a distance, could feel the spray off of them, coating his face in a fine mist of glimmering droplets. The two jets of water drove into the tree like a battering ram. Branches buckled, cracking with the sound of a whip, twigs leaping off high into the air to land in an entirely different part of the woods. The tree trunk swayed, stretched and finally arched over in a small explosion of splinters. Loose leaves skated over the shallow pond that had formed over the dry earth.

The tree trunk had been puny in its circumference, though this did little to detract from how impressed Nathan was in that moment.

"You're powerful as heck," he cried, jumping up and down on the spot.

Blastoise's only reply was to swivel so that it faced Nathan. The pokémon slowly blinked, awaiting the next command.

Nathan spent the next ten minutes ordering Blastoise to effectively tear up the woodside. Bubbles exploded out of its mouth; shrubbery gave way to a swipe its claws. At one point, Blastoise even used its skull bash on a signpost from Viridian City Council that warned travellers of the need to carry antidotes for poison and bug type stings and bites.

Eventually, after several water gun attacks, Nathan couldn't help but notice that the intensity of the canons seemed to lessen with every attack. Water that was once pressurized enough to strip bark from a tree, later dwindled to a stream only fit for watering potted plants in a garden. Blastoise panted as though it had been sprinting under a desert sun.

"You must be almost out of water," Nathan concluded.

Blastoise nodded.

"I'm getting pretty thirsty myself. Let's hit the road and we'll be at the Viridian pokémon centre in no time."

He held up the closed ball expectantly. At first nothing happened. It looked as if Blastoise was awaiting another command.

"Return, Blastoise!" Nathan called out.

Blastoise dissolved into red and its shapeless form was sucked into the centre of the pokéball.

The young pokémon trainer set off again at a faster pace than before, excitement fuelling his steps. He raced the lengthening shadows as he continued on the remainder of the trail that would lead to Viridian City.