Aaron and Grey - a Pokémon story

A Rock, a ,Ruffian and a Riolu

A small boy digs through a dumpster, looking for anything even mildly edible. He'd love to even get a half-eaten poképuff at this point. His stomach rumbles, and he focuses, looking for anything mildly out of place in the sea of green and black plastic There! He grabs something colorful, and finds...a small rock. "What even is it?" he wonders. "It's all glowy, and crystalline, but it's round, like a marble...maybe it's one of those mega stone things?" He ponders to himself as to whether his hypothesis could be correct, and he thinks about selling it for money at one of the shops, but he remembers that there isn't a shopkeeper in town he could sell it to. "Stupid new Lumiose Gang," he thinks to himself. "Well, it has the colors of Ronnie, maybe he'd like it," he suggests to himself, so he runs home. Well, as close to a home he can get. It's a small alcove cut into the wall of an abandoned building. The hole he uses to get in is covered by a towel, and it's hidden behind a dumpster, so the space to get in is too thin for many, and even then the hole in the building is smaller than most street thugs who come after him, so he made it his. It's even mildly spacious; Big enough for him, a mattress, a small box filled with books and other treasures, and a small pokémon bed, for his equally small Riolu, Ronnie. He crawled into his hole, set his bag down at the end of his mattress, and took the stone out. He questioned as to why it was even in the dumpster in the first place. "It wasn't even in a bag, just in the folds of one. I wonder if it belongs to one of those team flare thugs that creep around. Why do they even act like they're still relevant? The team disbanded a while ago, and they were pointless beforehand. At least not all of them are dumb enough to still wear those red suits as an alley dweller, they'd probably get beaten up by a real gang." He looked over at the sleeping Ronnie, and scratched him behind his ear. He had found Ronnie getting mobbed by a group of Scrafty, which he had to hit with a pole to get them to run away. The Riolu was small, even for a baby pokémon, and He took the small monster in, finding a similarity between them in his size. The Riolu was also intelligent, and understood many commands he gave him, which was useful in ambushes. The Riolu sleepily opened its eyes, looking at the small, dark-skinned boy, and perked up, almost jumping, then it remembered the ceiling was low, so it ran forward instead, crashing into the boy's arms. He laughed, and the small creature smiled, digging his nose into the boy's cheek. The reunion was short-lived however, as the boy heard voices outside, and signaled for the Riolu to quiet. "HEY, KID," he heard from outside, "WE'VE ALL GOTTEN WORD THAT YOU'VE GOT SOMETHING VALUABLE IN YOUR POSSESSION, AND WE WANT IT." He knew that voice everywhere, that was Dale, the biggest alley-man in this city. Dale picked on him a *lot*, but lucky for him he was small enough to slip through his legs. He didn't think about what would happen if he were too large to slip away in that fashion. Pain, probably. The boy then looked at the small stone he held in his hand. "Could word travel that quickly?" He thought. "No, it must be something I already have." He dug through his box and found all of the things he'd collected in his dumpster diving endeavors. A small, diamond-shaped crystal, an old, old, Kanto pokédex, and a wristband with what appears to be a charm capable of holding the crystal and the small rock he found just moments before were among the things he grabbed. And he couldn't forget the tablet. It was all glowy, and sometimes he couldn't take his eyes off of it, hypnotized by the perpetual motion appearing to come from inside the piece. He took all these, and a couple other things and put them in a duffle bag he had saved for occasions like this, grabbed his small, furry friend, and started heading out one of the many other exits from his alcove, when Dale yelled again, for he always yelled, never spoke. "AY KID, IF YOU DON'T COME OUT AN' GIVE IT TO ME I'M BREAKIN' DOWN YOUR WALL AND COMIN' IN MYSELF." The boy then escaped from the hole furthest from the one Dale was next to, and ran out onto the street. He just ran down the sidewalk, eager to get away from Dale, eager to just get away from his hole, the alley. Suddenly, his emotions seemed to take over as he thought about everything he had been through. With Dale, with the Lumiose Gang, with the kids at school before he moved. He wanted to forget all those bad memories, he wanted to get rid of them, and he just ran and ran and ran. Then he ran into Aaron. Literally.