Adventures Beyond!

Chapter 67: A Mother's Guides

---

Grotto PKMN Center, Sinnoh

The Pokémon Center was awfully quiet in the morning. In fact, it was more quiet than it had been in a long time. For years, the Pokémon Center of Forest Grotto would be used as shelter for the many injured Pokémon that would be brought by after coming into contact with Nidoking or the many Nidoran or Nidorino that were allied with him. There would always be someone to treat. Always someone that needed the help of Lucy, the sole medical worker in the Pokémon Center.

From the moment Nidoking began rampaging around Forest Grotto, hospitalizing a few of her friends from the Grotto Rangers, as well as hospitalizing many of the citizens that were living peacefully up until that time. But, when Logan, the son of one of her best friends from the Grotto Rangers, managed to rally the town together in order to take on Nidoking, all of that came to an end. There were still a lot of Pokémon left to be treated, but slowly, that number began to decrease with time.

As things stood, there were a small number of patients that still needed constant monitoring and treatment. And no two Pokémon came to her mind more than the Cinderace couple that lost around a decade of their lives to an incident that happened soon after the beginning of Nidoking's rampage.

Emily and Kenny.

While Kenny, Logan's father, was still in the same comatose state he had been in since the incident, Emily had woken up. When Lucy first saw her, exhausted and worn down by the years of muscle atrophy that plagued her body from the years she spent immobile. Despite the clear pain she was in, and the obvious struggle it had taken to get out of her room without the use of her legs, Emily still seemed focused on one thing, and one thing only.

Her son.

Lucy could only watch as Emily weakly clung to her and tried to bring herself to her feet, her frail vocal chords just barely able to speak her mind. Amidst the millions of thoughts and questions she could've asked, Emily's focus seemed to be on Logan the most. It was heartbreaking for the Blissey to have to watch, but she had to push that aside and focus on making sure Emily wouldn't overexert herself and end up doing damage to her already weak body.

As time passed, though, she noticed Emily's improvement. She began to speak quite quickly, albeit in a slowed, slurred way that was hard to understand at times. It was a little odd, but Lucy chalked it up to Emily's sheer determination to get better and eventually find her son.

Things slowly went from a little odd to downright improbable, though, when Emily's muscle atrophy was observed to have lessened significantly in only a week. Never in her life had she seen it improve at such an exponential rate. It was almost otherworldly with how quickly Emily's body began to recover.

Lucy began to write in a paper log that was in front of her, noting every little change that Emily had undergone since waking up.

"Emily seems to have made a considerable improvement in terms of her health. Her speech has slowly been getting better with the help of some speech therapy. She has also begun to use her paws more, and is able to coordinate them better than before. Today, I noticed that Emily was beginning to regain strength in her legs as well."

Lucy smiled at her notes, proud of her friend for making so much progress in such a short amount of time. That smile soon faded, though, as the Blissey's mind began to wander off to wondering how it was all happening. She flipped back a few pages to the log dated to a week prior. Her eyes began to run down the lines of the paper as she read.

"I was able to properly analyze Emily's body. What I found was... Strange, to say the least. I noticed something in Emily's right leg moving around. It wasn't a muscle. This entity was certainly foreign. I needed to get it out. With a berry mixture that was able to properly sedate Emily, I made an incision along the side of her leg and used some pliers to carefully inspect what was going on. What I found in her leg was utterly horrifying."