Pokemon: The Road to Absolution

Chapter 3

He was thinking all of this when he heard yelling coming from the alleyway he had just passed. He took a step back and peered down the narrow space between two tall buildings. There were three children running down the alleyway towards him, and also what looked to be a pokémon. The pokémon, that he presently recognised as a raticate, overtook the leader, who stopped dead in their tracks and pressed themselves up against the wall. The other two boys caught up and shouted at the third. They stood with their arms crossed, obviously at ease, in stark contrast to the boy who had glued himself to opposite side of the alleyway as the raticate inched towards him.

"Hey!" Nathan called out, running towards them as he fumbled for the pokéball inside of his jacket pocket.

"What are you boys up to?" he demanded. "You look like you're up to no good!"

The boy nearest unfolded his arms and pointed at Nathan.

"Keep outta this!" he said. "This ain't none of your business!"

The raticate pivoted towards Nathan, its tiny nose quivering. The giant front teeth were bared in a wicked sneer.

"Leave that boy alone, or I'll... I'll..."

"Or you'll do what?"

Nathan's reply was to lob a pokéball at the ground and watch his blastoise appear in its place.

The two boys who had given chase were now backing away. Nathan watched the raticate standing firm. It looked like it was up for the challenge. Its owner was not. The boy recalled his pokémon and he and his companion raced down the alleyway. Nathan returned Blastoise back into its pokéball.

He grinned at the boy who had been left behind.

"My blastoise doesn't even have any water left anyway," he said. "It could have been a pretty even fight. What's your name?"

The boy regarded Nathan with a wide eyed look of sweaty unease. He slipped past just as Nathan was about to say something else.

"Hey, wait!" Nathan cried, as the boy sprinted up the alleyway and ducked into the crowd. Perhaps he too had been frightened by the blastoise. But the boy hardly seemed like some kind of desperate street urchin. He had probably run straight home. He began theorising about what he had just witnessed. The boys could have been schoolmates, threatening the other for their lunch money. No, that didn't seem right. He had seen his fair share of childhood bullying, but his experience of school, being from Pallet as he was, amounted to very little.

He remembered only fragments of his early days at Pallet Primary. Beyond that, his town didn't put a whole lot of emphasis, or funding for that matter, on education when compared to the bigger cities. Most kids ended up helping their parents who had come from generations of farmers. This extended to those who helped out at the Oak ranch, where some of those who appeared more likely candidates for academia took positions as research assistants and quickly found their way into the scientific community. Nathan's mom had wanted him to apply for such a role, but he didn't have the aptitude nor the desire to be craning over a series of test tubes in a soulless laboratory. He was also certain that he would never work on Oak's ranch. Not after what had happened to his father.

The rest of Pallet's small population could be forgiven for thinking that they had been overlooked when it came to a more thorough education. The people of Pallet had long become known for their simplistic and rural ways. It still didn't stop Nathan's mom from buying a barrel load of textbooks and all but locking him in his room in the evenings. In all that time he learned more about safely jumping out of his window than he did about trigonometry and the Alolan language. He was never going to be a great academic like the professor. He knew that his purpose lay firmly somewhere else.