My Pokepastas - 2019-2020

The Dead and the Damned (10/31/20)

It was a horrifying and heartrending thing, realizing I was dead. I remembered my child, Cubone, clinging close to me, staring with frightened innocent eyes at the human men in the red in the black suits who had come to take him away. I remembered stepping forward, flaring with a protective anger, ready to kill to protect my son. And then...

Floating, disembodied, hazy. I stared over my own broken and bloodied form, detached and numb. Cubone was nowhere to be seen - I could only pray he'd fled to safety.

It took a time to realize what I had become. Torn from this mortal coil, I had become a restless spirit of resentment and sorrow. Around me, the eyes of my now-fellow spirits watched me, their faces unreadable. My heart stung with bitter anger. Neither me nor my child had done anything wrong, anything to deserve this!

I haunted the halls of the Tower I had known as a home for most of my life, amongst the other lonely dead. All mortal men were barred entry to my final resting place, the force of my grudge chilling their souls with my very presence.

Foolhardy humans, every now and again, attempted to capture me in Pokeballs, but they passed through my ethereal form. I would merely frighten such fools away, and so rumors began to circulate about my hauntings in the world of man... or so I had heard from the speakings of the Tower's other denizens, at least.

One day - though all time tends to blend together when you're a spirit - the men in suits returned. There was a violent anger in me, a vengeance for a time stolen from me.

I saw in their eyes dedication and malice. They had known I would be here, had come prepared. In the hand of one was an unusual black Pokeball with red markings across it. But I cared not how they decorated their useless trinkets. I had never been captured before, and I had come to believe that would never change. So, when the suited man tossed the strange Pokeball at me, I bothered not to attempt dodging.

That had been my greatest mistake.

There had been a sensation of being numbed, swallowed up into a neverending bright light, and being washed away by a gentle haze of sleepiness... but I found myself still thrashing about in a desperate panic even as I was captured. I became a formless nothing in an endless white space, and a dreamless sleep threatened to overtake me. I fought it viciously, of course.

But a sense of wrongness gnawed at the edges of my thoughts, closing around my fears of being controlled by the suited men. This was wrong. This was wrong.

I had never been captured by a human before when I had been living, but some of my siblings at the den I had grown up in had. They had told stories of humans both good and bad, but the stories of the sensation of being captured remained the same - a peaceful half-dreaming state where you could freely peek out into the world beyond your new gilded cage, perhaps even breaking out back into freedom with enough effort... nothing like this choking blindness where I scarcely had the strength to stay awake, much less escape.

Yet despite my inability to see the outside world, I could still overhear it. One of the suited men spoke in muttering tones - "Are you sure this'll work? I've never seen a Pokeball thrash this much..."

The other laughed with the warmth of a lake frozen to the bottom. "Of course it'll work. It was designed especially to hold... special cases like this. Besides, with what this thing'll do to its mind, soon it won't WANT to escape..." I believe he then picked up my prison, as the sensation of sudden violent movement was enough to make my grasp on lucidity slip away, casting me off into sleep before I could puzzle over the meaning of their words.

The experiences afterwards felt like hazy, unfinished snapshots - brief moments of waking, enough for me to understand something was happening, but not what.