Re: il NaNo di surskitty; a currently untitled KHR/Pokémon crossover fusion
[currently untitled arc 1]
Be at the Ilex Shrine in one hour, the letter states, and who is she to ignore it? She doesn't -- quite -- recognize the handwriting, neat and elaborate as a clock face, but the signature is a finger-painted clam and it's been decades since she last saw it.
Reborn wants a favour. And, given the letter's mysterious appearance on her desk, he's likely willing to use some of his -- resources. (She hasn't needed extra time in a long while, but he's helped her in subtler ways when it suits him.) There's no reason not to go, at least; no one should know of their agreements and in the unlikely circumstance that it's faked, the only people it'll inconvenience are the culprits. He is not known for his patience for those who would damage his reputation and he is never late.
She goes.
"You're late," the small child says as he adjusts his fedora. It'd be amusing if she hadn't seen him defeat an irritated salamence with his left hand.
"I am exactly on time, you will find," she states calmly and waits. He looks at her levelly, then smiles.
"I would like you to pass off an -- anonymous tip, shall we say." He hops up onto her shoulder and explains. It's not glamorous, but she's sure he has his reasons and -- it's easy enough. Why not?
She hasn't heard anything notable about this 'Gokudera Hayato' anyway; Reborn tends to pick unknowns as the targets for his machinations and turn them into assets. Her current employer likely wouldn't mind, assuming he found out (and she has no intention of letting him find out; while Reborn's request is probably harmless, her -- agreement with him isn't).
According to legend, the wish pokémon jirachi awakens for about a week every thousand years. This is not entirely accurate; they typically average three wishes granted over a millenium, but if they were only awake for a week in a thousand years, there likely wouldn't be any legends about them.
People need to learn the legends somewhere.
Now, if one person wished for immortality, then they might tell others of the small metallic star pokémon and its ability to grant wishes, but that would be silly; if it grants wishes so rarely, why would one tell everyone of this chance for wishes? Three wishes can be written on its tags and it grants them when it awakens.
Three wishes.
One thousand years.
The odds of any one wish being fulfilled within the wisher's lifetime are astronomical. While the xatu may know when and where jirachi will awaken, they are not known for their outgoing natures. They are pokémon, after all, and one of the most important facets of the pokémon psyche is this: do no harm, which then means information is shared on a need-to-know basis, and usually no one needs to know. Certainly not most humans, and even the most trustworthy humans have difficulty with the idea of 'do no harm'. (Which is not to say that pokémon are rather better about it; they tend to underestimate the fragility of those who do not live by tooth and claw, and the pokémon of legend often fail to grasp the realities of truly living. Suicune's ability to purify water sources sounds wonderful if the fact that the food chain rests predominately on filter feeders is ignored. There are reasons the pokémon of legend rarely show themselves to others; their abilities can destroy entire ecosystems by accident.)
This assumes there is only one jirachi, which is very nearly true, but the difference between 'is very nearly' and 'is' can be like night and day.
It takes Hayato at least an hour after he's arrived in Azalea (thank you, Shamal, for not being a complete deadbeat, he would say if he had less pride, or perhaps if the alakazam cared) before he realizes something important: while Saki-san had said that a jirachi would awaken somewhere near Azalea in the next week, she had not actually told him to do anything about it. He hasn't dealt with her before -- he usually avoids working with Team Rocket, though he must admit that their gadgets are awesome and he wants them all -- but he's heard that she makes her expectations very clear.
She did not say anything along the lines of catching it, or even what to wish for, assuming the legends about it being able to grant only three wishes were accurate and that it even had wishes left.
Now, he's fairly good at ignoring loopholes -- he doesn't really want to risk being blacklisted and there aren't that many people with both a pokémon that's good at controlled detonations and a pokémon that can ensure he can, you know, check to make sure it exploded while keeping him safe, particularly not in Kanto -- but ... it's a jirachi. It might not actually exist, but it's a jirachi and he has options and if she didn't want him to consider abusing loopholes, she shouldn't have left them in.
Decisions made, he checks that Shamal and Enban are out and about and settles in for the evening outside the Ilex Forest gatehouse.
He realises after a while that it might be a good idea to have his magnezone out, too.
The problem, when you get down to it, is that Azalea is a fundamentally boring town. Nothing interesting happens in Azalea. The pokéball maker -- Hayato can't be bothered to learn his name; apricorn balls are usually inefficient, Hayato does demolitions not pokémon captures, and the old geezer isn't known for his love of the ethically questionable -- lives there, to be sure, but he's the only person of note in the whole damn town. The local religion and mythos focus on slowpoke, and if that isn't an indicator that he's in bumfuck nowhere, Hayato can make like his name and fly.
It'd be a great place to send someone you don't particularly care for on a snipe hunt. And while he'd like to follow that train of thought, there are a few main problems with that. One, Saki-san had no real incentive to get him out of the way. While it didn't take a genius to figure out that he'd be with Team Rocket for exactly as long as it took to find someplace better (or until he had to actually face what it is most of them actually did, but he'd been with Silph for long enough to know that Team Rocket had enough legit branches to last indefinitely) he's good at what he does. Two, no one with half of a brain would try anything shady near Azalea. The pokéball maker is nasty.
Most importantly, it's the Ilex Forest. He doesn't expect most people to understand the significance of it -- kids these days have no respect for legends (and if there is any irony in this statement, Hayato wouldn't see it) -- but the home of the shrine to the fairy of time is important. Jirachi is not Celebi, of course, but the granter of wishes awakes for a week every thousand years. The guardian of the forest travels through -- and manipulates? -- time. He wouldn't be surprised if there was a connection. It would be logical.
Heh, logical. As if pokémon had any truck with human logic. Anyone who expected a pokémon to act like a person would be sorely disappointed, and the pokémon of legend were odd even by pokémon standards.
He doesn't notice the boy slinking out of the forest until the kid pauses at the checkpoint door.
"You're out late," Hayato says easily as he drops off the tree branch. He's taller than the boy by at least a head, though he thinks they might be close to the same age. There's something about the kid's physically implausible poofy light brown hair and his large vapid eyes that makes him look younger, though.
The kid looks up at him like a startled sentret, ready to run as soon as the coast is clear. Belated, Hayato realises he might look a bit intimidating: he's wearing incredibly awesome leather and jewelry and he thinks he looks fucking badass. He briefly feels bad about worrying the kid, but then decides he doesn't care.
"A-ah," the kid manages. "I wanted to talk to a -- friend. I'm going home." If he was any more obvious, he'd be wearing safety orange. Stupid kid probably thought Hayato'd want to waste his time beating up ... well, someone who'd probably fought their lunch and lost.
"Huh," is all Hayato says as he waits for the kid to leave so he can get back to waiting for the alakazam or magnezone to find something. (Where is Shamal, anyway? he wonders, knowing even as he thinks it that he's probably off getting drunk somewhere while hitting on everything female that moves.)
The kid starts to open the door, then pauses. Starts again. Turns to look at the magnezone in confusion. Sighs.
Hayato is just about to ask what's taking him so damn long when a small child -- a bit older than a toddler, but not significantly -- in a suit and a fedora walks in, hands the kid a chrysalis on a stick, and smirks as the kid bolts. "Ciaossu, Gokudera," the small child says suavely.
What the fuck, Hayato thinks, but for once he doesn't actually say it. "Come again?"
The kid jump kicks him in the face. "Ciaossu, Gokudera. I am Reborn."
"That's fucking wonderful, but I'm a bit busy right now," he snaps. And promptly regrets saying that as the kid -- Reborn -- kicks him in the face again.
"No backtalk. You are one of Saki's, correct?" Well, Hayato wouldn't say that, but he thinks if he said as much the kid would kick him again and that hurts, so he just nods. "I would like you to challenge my student."
"... Huh." It's not what he came here for, but he has a feeling that it's relevant. To something, at least. (Reborn probably learned his name from Saki-san -- why else would he bring her up? Don't answer that. -- in which case it was at least a possibility that he'd know of what she told Hayato.) "Who's your student?"
"Sawada Tsunayoshi," Reborn pronounces distinctly, "who is almost entirely useless and looks as though he lost a fight to a hair dryer. You just met him."
Bad luck, or possibly Reborn's just an asshole, and while he's heard of 'never attribute to malice what could be attributed to ignorance', he's rarely gone wrong in assuming people are assholes. That's okay, though; he can deal with assholes. "So, what do you want me to do?"
"Find him and battle him. Do what you want. I don't care."
"He just left," Hayato states, slightly baffled.
"That isn't my problem."
It takes Hayato a depressingly long length of time to wonder why someone who looks about three would refer to someone in their early teens -- fairly eloquently, he might add -- as his student.
He then feels incredibly stupid when he realises that wait: legendary pokémon can probably disguise themselves. Most of them supposedly sleep most of the time, but he knows for a fact that suicune, raikou, and entei wander Johto for a year or so every other decade, and given that they haven't been caught (as far as he knows, anyway; he is very nearly right) they are either amazingly skilled at evasion or moderately competent at disguise. More to the point, jirachi is probably one of the more humanoid ones; he doesn't trust the sketch Saki-san gave him but it's a baseline, even if it's likely inaccurate. While suicune, raikou, and entei probably couldn't disguise themselves as humans (he'd assume they'd pretend to be growlithe or houndoom, though that may be difficult for suicune and raikou. On the other hand, humans can't usually sense a pokémon's elemental affinity, and pokémon rarely betray pokémon to humans), jirachi ... might be able to manage it.
Shamal is right; he really is an idiot. The kid said he was meeting a friend. In Ilex Forest! Who lived in Ilex Forest, anyway? No one, as far as he knows. No one human, anyway. Now, celebi ... celebi would make some sense, except for why a celebi might know Saki-san. (It also made a lot more sense that a fucking time fairy would kick him in the face rather than a tiny kid. Not to mention it was less embarrassing.) He decides to ask about it if he ever sees the asshole again, but he figures he probably won't.
Somewhere, Reborn and Shamal are sharing a drink and congratulating themselves on a job well fucked up. At least the dumbass probably would never realise that it's their faults that he made the right mental leaps within the next month much less the same day.
Once he figures out what he should do, finding the Sawada brat is absurdly easy: he takes out the luxray's pokéball, presses the button, and tells him to hunt down the kid that'd been right -- there earlier.
"Toraa?" Uri says, swishing his tail back and forth while looking at Hayato like he's an idiot.
He doesn't know who you're talking about, Shamal says, mental 'voice' slurred slightly. The alakazam is sitting safely in a tree, though his feet dangle down right where Hayato wants to grab one and tug. He doesn't, though.
Instead he frowns at Uri, and then at Shamal, and says slowly, "There was a kid here earlier. Enban should have seen him, as did Budou. Find him."
The luxray turns to the alien and UFO duo and whines softly. They blink slowly in response, sort of like a nod, and Uri tries zapping Hayato lightly like a jerk.
They say you're a dumbass, Hayato. That wasn't a kid, the alakazam translates deliberately.
"Then what the fuck was it?"
"WHY THE FUCK DIDN'T ANY OF YOU SAY ANYTHING!?!"
Reborn sips his espresso with glee and decides that next time he sees Shamal, he's paying for the booze.
Tsuna looks at the cat pokémon with a strange expression on his face. Not quite fear, exactly, and certainly not confidence; more like the knowledge that whatever happens, he'll've done his best. Very reassuring, except that he's sure that whatever his best is, it's not going to be good enough, and he is very nearly right.
"Have you, um. Have you considered reconsidering?" he says eloquently. Great job, No Good Tsuna, he thinks, that will definitely impress Mr Scary Punk Guy.
The guy -- Gokudera Hayato, he supposes; he might as well actually try to remember the name of the scary guy with a scary cat ('The foe's LUXRAY's Intimidate halved its attack!' he almost wants to blurt out; he's been playing too many video games lately) -- looks at him like he's wearing a pineapple hat on his head. "What?" Apparently this guy seems to have subscribed to the Sawada Tsunayoshi Magazine of Eloquence; he should charge fees.
"I'm. Um. Really not interesting!" he says quickly. "It's true! There is absolutely nothing of interest about me! Move along!"
"... My magnezone trapped you," he states flatly. This is in fact a great deduction and for a moment Tsuna has to wonder if he came up with that himself.
"I stepped in glue," he says instead.
The jerkity jerkface smirks slightly. "My luxray said, and I quote the goddamn alakazam, that you smell of 'rust and bent dreams'."
"It's cheap bodywash." This sounds stupid even to Tsuna but he really can't think of anything better right now pressure is bad pressure is bad.
"And like you would be delicious to crunch on."
"Your luxray is a psychopath."
From the looks of it, Gokudera has to admit this is true. Still, he charges on: "Your tutor is apparently a three-year old."
"That's a lie! Reborn sometimes wears diapers." ... ... ... congratulations, Tsuna. Oddly, Gokudera looks thrown by this information. ... Tsuna is never going to feel proud of himself again.
Eventually, his amazing abilities at stalling run out and the guy finally gets around to ordering, "Uri! Fire Fang!" and it's at that point that Tsuna really starts to hate his life. His very first pokémon battle! A crazy man with a giant lion thing with teeth! Teeth that are on FIRE. He is clearly about to be eaten by a freaking cat thing from Sinnoh. Not even one of the civilized regions! Sinnoh. And, to top it all off, someone named it 'melon'? Really? Sob.
Somewhere in his tiny idiot brain, something approaching battling instincts fights past the self-pity and into the fray. That's the only explanation he has for punching a luxray in the nose, anyway. It's a viable strategy! -- Only from the luxray's expression, it'd been punched in the face harder by its lunch before. Which isn't to say that half of his mind wasn't screaming it's going to eat me it's going to eat me it's going to eat me (and if he runs into Lambo again he is never going to mock him when he baas loudly at the sight of dangerous predators, like pidgey). For all he knew, he totally was lunch. But anyway. Back to vain attempts at punching. The whole problem with the 'punching lions' concept was that ... it's Tsuna's first pokémon battle. Certainly the first where he was the one trying to run away and sucking at it. From the luxray's battle scars, it had been in battle. A lot. Tsuna? NOT SO MUCH.
So he punches it in the eye instead and feels very proud of himself for the whole second before the luxray decides really, enough is enough. Stupid tiny pokémon should eat electrical discharge.
For reasons involving a lot more science than Tsuna understands, steel types are not resistant to electric. It's a character flaw. (Or possibly it's for similar reasons that one does not put forks in electrical sockets. Given that Tsuna has had difficulty with the concept of 'forks do not belong in electrical sockets even if it makes awesome sounds and sparks a little', it is perhaps not a surprise that he doesn't know why electrical attacks work perfectly well against steels. It's a bit more of a surprise that he hasn't yet managed to fatally electrocute himself, however.)
On the plus side, it is difficult for him to stop being able to feel his legs. On the minus side, he instead feels slightly like his head was hollowed out and replaced with steel wool, or possibly Lambo, or maybe even blue cheese. He likes blue cheese. Blue cheese is awfully ... blue. And blue's a lovely colour, isn't it? Except on luxray. He feels very strongly about that for some reason. Blue is good, luxray is not so good.
... Gokudera, while entirely unaware of Tsuna's extraordinarily eloquent internal monologue, does notice that the kid -- now clearly a jirachi, thankfully; that fell apart as soon as it started shrinking away from Uri (and while he'd love to be able to mock him/it for being scared of a cat, Gokudera knows full well that Uri is a force of nature) -- staggers backwards, its head safely out of the luxray's mouth (pity; according to his calculations that should've been more effective than it was). It's still conscious, though, so he feels absolutely no qualms about taking an empty -- level should do -- level ball or three from his pocket and tossing it at the fairy.
The jirachi in question says something along the lines of "Raa?" or possibly "Aw, fuck," (he's not entirely clear on the distinction; the jirachi is probably making like a psychic and projecting, he figures) and pops into the ball.
Wiggle.
Wiggle.
Wiggle.
... BOOM.
As far as Tsuna is concerned, that explosion? Completely unplanned. He knows he thought -- well, a lot of things, really -- and then that he was in a ball and he did not want to be and then -- what? He can't think of anything he did that'd make something explode....
"Well done, Tsuna," Reborn says from a corner Tsuna is sure was unoccupied a few minutes ago. He's sitting on the shoulder of some alakazam that Tsuna's pretty sure he's never seen before in his life, but given how Reborn operates that means nothing. Reborn could be having coffee with that alakazam every Thursday for years and Tsuna could know nothing about it. Of course, Reborn could've met the alakazam just now and simply act like they'd known each other forever; people had a tendency to think of Reborn the way Reborn wanted them to think right then.
The alakazam in question nudges the unconscious luxray and the half-conscious kid with his foot, then raises an eyebrow at Tsuna. This yours?
... Oh. Whoops. Tsuna stares at the cat and trainer for a moment, then half-nods, focusing on undoing some of -- whatever he just did. Not in Reborn's sense of 'undoing' -- it'd still have happened -- but more ... making things a bit more like they were a few minutes earlier. Simple wishes. Simple Wishes, even.
"... What?" Gokudera mumbles, staring blearily at Tsuna and thinking for a moment that he really should've worn goggles today. ... Then he notices that his contacts aren't damaged or anything else that might be an immediate problem, they're just mysteriously absent. Much better, though he's going to need new ones... "... What," he says again as Tsuna, Reborn, and Shamal's presence registers itself in his brain.
Hayato, I feel that I should reiterate this: you're an idiot. The alakazam's crossing his arms and nudging Gokudera with his foot some more. It'd nearly count as kicking, if only it wasn't an alakazam doing it. As it was, Gokudera tries to ignore it for a few seconds, then grabs the alakazam's foot and bites it. Om nom nom Shamal's spoon in his eye. It's all Shamal's fault anyway for being a jerk.
"Reborn, what exactly just happened?" Tsuna asks, trying his best to ignore the impending fistfight between the alakazam and the crazy guy; this is easy given that Tsuna's biggest and most used skill is denial, and hard given that the two fighting idiots are loud, idiots, and fighting. There are also two of them.
The celebi waits for the alakazam to be clearly winning -- which takes slightly longer than he expects; apparently Tsuna's Wish (a very familiar one: 'I wish for half of that guy's health to be restored in six seconds!') took effect and Gokudera was able to shove Shamal in the shoulder, but at the end of the day Shamal is infinitely more competent than his idiot protégé -- before kicking Gokudera in the face and reclaiming his perch on Shamal's shoulder. "Wait, useless Tsuna. Gokudera Hayato, you are an idiot."
Gokudera stands up slowly. "Okay, why the fuck am I an idiot?"
Because throwing pokéballs at pokémon that can blow them up is a bad idea. Shamal sighs, shaking his head in Tsuna's general direction. Particularly if it's not actually that weakened.
"I didn't know it was going to explode!" Tsuna bursts out. "I just --"
Reborn grins, not entirely kindly. "It is good that I now know you can use Doom Desire. I was concerned; you had seemed entirely incompetent. Gokudera, I would like your assistance in training Tsuna."
"Um," said the two involved.
You going to look after Hayato, too? Shamal says easily. Have fun.
"Um."
"That's settled, then."
"What."
