Adventures in the Insane: A Pokemon Story

Removing Memory Blocks

     I stepped over a pile of ruined books, the combination of being thrown around in a collapsing building and the relentless rain ripping the salvation of their pages away. Pockets of fire burned in defiance against the rain, making picking through the rubble more precarious if such a thing was possible. 
      To put it as lightly as possible- we were looking for bodies. It was already late and beyond the open library hours when the explosives knocked the main support beams out from under the old building, so it was more than likely no one had been inside when it collapsed. Psychic Pokemon roamed the ruins all the same to make sure there hadn't been any unfortunate passerby when the structure crumbled. So far the only victims were over a thousand worlds kept on paper with ink that now ran in rivulets down to sewer drains on the opposite side of the street. 
      "I don't get it." Alan stooped to rescue a couple of books, shoving them under his rain coat. "Why take out the Canalave City Library?"
      "Maybe they really hate doing homework," Ripley quipped from farther down the hill of rubble, following Kirlia as she scoured the area for any victims. 
      "All these books," Ken said sadly. "I'd heard the geology section of this library was divine."
      "If you're lucky, maybe that entire section is preserved on one of the lower floors," Rebecca said from the bottom of the pile, a stack of the less damaged books starting to form next to her under the covered bus station at the edge of the chaos. 
      "Lucky," I scoffed. "Not with me around."
      "What?" Sam slipped on a brick, but caught herself before she could meet the rest of the red clay pieces with her teeth. "Not who what with where?" 
      "What?" I pulled her to the stable spot I'd found. "What are you talking about, Sam?" 
      "No. What are you talking about, Kris?" 
      "Nothing." I turned away, focusing on what was beneath my feet, stopping now and then to check out a book. (Frank the Observer: LOOK A PUN. GET IT?)
      "Not nothing." Sam grabbed my arm. "What's wrong, Kris? What happened?"
      "I get why you yell at me all the time now." I felt like I was talking around a lemon. "I mess everything up. I get people hurt. I get myself hurt. And I drag everyone with me when I go down." Exhausted from my earlier crying episode, I sat down on a beaten chair and let the world sit on my shoulders. "I mean I guess at one time I was helpful. Not that I knew what I was doing, but now I can't even get by on dumb luck."
      "That's not true," Sam attempted. 
      "Isn't that why you sent me home and away from everyone? So I wouldn't be able to hurt anyone else?" The chair started a mini avalanche and someone squeaked as they avoided the moving ruin. I stood up quickly. 
      "Well," Sam kicked at a brick. "That's true- to some extent- but you don't mess everything up. That's not what I was trying to make you understand when I sent you away." She uncovered a book that looked fairly intact and shoved it in her coat. "Kris, what happened on that ship?" 
      My attempt to change the subject failed. 
      "Obviously something happened on that ship that made you feel this way. What was it? Because I can guarantee you were only a victim of circumstance as usual." Sam stopped moving and glared somewhere into the darkness and rain.
      "Thinking about what you said?" I allowed a small grin to my features. Clearly I had put myself in the situation, so being a victim of circumstance wasn't a viable excuse. I'd made mistakes and others had paid for it; I'd gotten off with a briefcase full of guilt and a cut on my finger. Wait. That wasn't there earlier. I poked at it and it started to bleed, my immediate reaction was to suck on the wound till it clotted.
      "Kris! Take your finger out of your mouth!" Sam pulled my hand away, inspecting what couldn't even be called a minor injury. "Kris," she sighed. "Kris." Starting and stopping again, she was trying to find the words that wouldn't hurt me, but they weren't the ones I wanted to hear. I tried pulling away and she cupped the side of my face. "You're the biggest idiot I've ever met." Honesty. Good. That's what I wanted.
      "An idiot that gets everyone around her hurt." I finished.
      "No. Shut up. You're ruining the moment."
      "What moment?" Alan scaled down the face of the rubble pile, now loaded up with salvageable books.
      "Damn it. Go away! I'm having a tender moment with Kris." Alan nodded sympathetically and walked under our weird embrace/ touching thing on his way down to the small bookshop Rebecca was collecting. "Idiot." Sam made a noise of irritation. "See? You're all idiots! But there are reasons I put up with you," she quickly rectified.  
     "Like?" Fishing for a redeeming quality and  glad to have moved on from discussing the ship just yet, I made it apparent I wasn't going to bolt. Sam moved her hands into mine, a little sweaty, but firm and reassuring.
     "No matter what, your heart is in the right place, Kris. Sometimes you forget why you're doing something and everything starts to get out of hand," she shook her head. The strange Magikarp incident popped in my head. "But subconsciously you're doing what you can to help someone else. That's why I sent you home." Nothing immediately positive about hitting my head on a rock and following a classy school of Magikarp had me tilting my head in hopes she would explain herself. "If we had kept on the journey without Jay you would have been swallowed into a pit of self pity. And I really didn't feel like fishing you out."
     "I've made a mistake." My expression pulled back sharply like I had tasted something sour. "I thought this was the part where you make me feel better."
     The rain picked that moment to start coming down harder. Sam dragged me away from the pile of rubble to the small dry space under the bus stop, mumbling as she went, saying something that sounded like 'I don't give a buck to your mealings.' 
     It didn't take long for the others to join us; Rebbeca getting shoved back into the corner of the three wall enclosure, the books forming a second layer to the back structure.
      "How goes your moment?" Alan asked coyly.
      "I keep forgetting what I'm trying to get at," Sam responded bitterly before taking my face in both her hands and drawing it closer to hers so she could look me nice and uncomfortably in the eyes. "We'll get to your insecurities later. What. Happened. On. That. Ship."
       "I may or may not have mentioned it before," Rebecca spoke up. "But Kris can't remember."                  "Why? Did she hit her head?"
      "Or is she blocking something?" I couldn't tell who suggested the last one, mostly because Sam had decided to squish my face into her boobs. Flailing my arms, she let go of my head and focused her need to constrain me on my still wheeling limbs.