The Friendly Battle & Other Pokemon One-Shots

Tapu

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When Isabel is four, she sees Tapu Koko for the first time. The television is small and the signal full of fuzz but her parents point to one of the figures bobbing on the stadium field and tell her this is the first tapu Isabel's namesake captured, the very night after she became the first champion of the Alolan league. And Isabel can become champion too one day, the first Alolan there's ever been.

They do not tell her Tapu Koko was also the first tapu Isabel's namesake traded away after she returned to Kanto, barely six months later. That she'll hear in two months, when tourists chatter about what rubes the Alolans had been back then, to think Tapu Koko was anything special. "Can you believe," they laugh, "the natives used to worship it."

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When Keli'iwaiwai'oleka'aihuelani is eight, she rinses her bloody mouth with seawater and spits it out on the wet sand in a prayer to Tapu Lele. If it is your will, may I heal. If it is your will, may I die.

It's rare the tourist children win the scuffles, even those far bigger than her, but it's rarer still to escape the beating from the kahuna or captains that follows. But one of the lessons of Tapu Lele is that there are many types of winning and many types of losing. The bite Keli'iwaiwai'oleka'aihuelani left on Kahuna Hau's arm after he split her lip and called her Isabel festers, a red and swollen brand like sunburn on a tourist, and Keli'iwaiwai'oleka'aihuelani tells the other kids it's proof Tapu Lele still watches over their islands, still judges, even if she's been far away in Kalos passed between strangers since before any of them were born.

"She's ours," Keli'iwaiwai'oleka'aihuelani says, fingers clenched in tight fists against anyone who'll say otherwise. "We're hers."

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When Waiwai'ole is twelve, she climbs Mount Lanakila and spraypaints Tapu Bulu's colors across the new storefronts' windows with the rest of Team Kamaʻi. Half of them get caught but Waiwai'oli makes it away back down the defiled mountain and that afternoon sits with Ms. Plumeria in her trailer as Salazzle spits out solvent to help the gang scrub the evidence out from under their fingernails.

"You're no kahuna," Ms. Plumeria says half an hour later, hands holding to either side of the doorway as he tries to push his way in. She's not the only adult who says it about them these days but Waiwai'oli has never known another one who dares do so to any of their faces. "No tapu chose you. Get lost." Curled around her side, Salazzle growls the same warning.

"I don't know how Nanu ran things -"

"Yeah," Ms. Plumeria interrupts, and Waiwai'ole can hear Tapu Bulu rumbling in her voice, promise and threat. "So fuck off."

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When she is sixteen, she stands on foreign ground above the body of a trainer and with bloody hands cracks the pokeball on his belt. She kneels. "Purity of calamity," she prays as the gale rises. "Even if it is to drag the islands beneath the waves, come back to us, Tapu Fini."