Pookamon

New Beginnings

Would the screaming never cease? The man clutched his head in distress. So much for guard duty. It wasn’t like this in the old days. Back then it was all stealing Pokemon and having fun. Oh yes, they had been beaten, many, many times (he still smarted when he thought of all the electric burns he had suffered trying to catch that cursed Pikachu) but at least it had been so much easier and more peaceful.

He didn’t like making them suffer.

He coiled his blue hair about his hands and pulled on it, anxious. The creatures moaned in their cells, begging to be released, pleading with him in soft, sorrow-filled voices or howling as their Pokemon side took over.

He really did hate working here.

Eventually the sounds got too much for him. He stood up and wandered to the coffee machine. Perhaps a hot drink would help. It certainly couldn’t hurt. He threw himself against the wall as two men in Team Rocket shirts and dragging a semi-conscious Nidoran-male morph walked past. They were in something of a hurry.

James followed them, scuffing his feet along the corridor. He remembered a Pokemon he had owned years ago, as a child, a Growlithe. He had loved Growly, just as he had been fond of Meowth. Both of them were gone now. Meowth had not survived metamorphosis. He hated what they were done to his friends.

Why did they have to kill them?

He watched as the guards threw the poor, beaten nidoranmorph into the cell and then wandered away. One nodded at him.

"How goes the business?" He said, in a friendly enough fashion.

James shrugged, "the usual, screams, pleas, nothing new."

"Don’t you love it when they try and bargain with you?" The other guard asked, smiling maniacally.

"Not really." He was not going to say how he despised it with avengence, how he wished he could help them. Or at least leave his post, but he had drawn the short straw, had to stay here until the change of the guards.

The two guards departed, leaving James alone in the hallway.

For a moment, he remembered his partner, Jessie. The two had been so close in their endevours to catch that damned Pikachu, but now things had turned to chaos. Since Giovanni had started putting all his funds into morphing Pokemon and taken Jessie and James off thieving duties (because they couldn’t steal a dead rattata), they had not seen each other. James was on night duties, and Jessie on day, and as for Meowth… he had been told the poor cat Pokemon had not survived.

Oh yes, he missed Jessie, with her long red hair and deep blue eyes. Even though she was always bossing him around and belittling him. At least she did it in a friendly way.

He became aware of quiet sobbing, beneath the pleas and the frightened howling. Peering through the grid in the door, he saw the nidoranmorph had awoken and was crying, softly into its hands. James felt the desire to go in there, comfort him. It seemed wrong, so wrong, to keep them like this, they were intelligent beings, almost human. Nothing alive deserved to be made to fight and then locked away until the next time.

Spot the irony?

He opened the door, closing it with a "Click" behind him and entered the tiny room. The young Nidoranmorph looked up as he entered and stared at him with lost, purple-red eyes.

"Come to torture me?" He asked, softly. "It won’t work you know, I’m already dead, inside. Nothing you can do will break me. You’ve already done your worst."

"I’m not going to hurt you," James said softly. "I wanted to comfort you."

The creature looked him straight in the eyes, a piercing look that tore almost to his very soul. "Why?"