After the End (ended, due to inactivity)

[Alliniere]

Re: After the End

Meredith was with Quilava wandering around, playing with pokemon, though they never talked back to them.

"Quilava... Why is everyone gone?"
"Probably because, to you, they are gone... I mean, your parents, everyone you knew is dead. Not to be harsh, but... the only reality is what the world's been like for the past 3 years." As the sentence was finished, their surroundings changed around them. No longer in her hometown, she was in her cottage, at the edge of Celadon Cliff, Blip suddenly appeared, and hopped onto her shoulder.

"I remember when we first met, Merry. You were sitting on the cliff, crying, because she had fallen into the sea. You looked like you'd been crying for days-"

"I had been."

"I tried to make you happy, I didn't like seeing you so sad. I made funny faces, and tried to cheer you up. You stopped crying, took me in, fed me, cared for me, adn eventually, I let myself stay in that Ultra Ball. We were friends, and while you were depressed, sometimes I saw the real you. Then, one day, you met Beryl. Reality changed again. And you were brought out of depression. You fell into love."

 

[Meririn]

Re: After the End

Beryl tried to control his emotions as he walked towards the exit door of the school. On this day when he was twelve, he hadn't known what was going to happen. It was a day like any other, and he was just going to exercise his Pokemon as he always did. Behind him, his two Eevees followed, looking as perfect as he'd been able to keep them back then. He knew that in his shoulder bag, he'd have fur health products and seperate brushes for each of them. Briefly, he wondered whatever had happened to them.

The re-preteen found the doors and pushed them open. It was a cloudy day. The grass was still dry, though, so instead of going back inside, he went directly to the far wall, away from anyone else, where the other kids wouldn't tease him for being so meticulous with his Pokemon. Here, he was in the only place in the yard where he was invisible from the school. He tried to remember how he had done this the first time. Normally, at this age, he had frolicked with Calydon and Atalanta, but on this day he was still glum after being shucked into another private school by his parents, so he'd read instead. Sensing his mood, his Pokemon had already run off to play tag on their own by the time he'd properly sat down. He took out the book and waited, trying to control his mounting fear that something would go wrong because he knew what would happen. But he was determined to prove to Milanda that he was brave, and that gave him the strength to sit still.

 

[Alliniere]

Re: After the End

Reality changed again, this time, Natalie had appeared around her neck, and Scizor stood behind her. This reality was not so distinct. Sometimes, it seemed like a green world, one renewed, filled with pokemon, and people. Then, it seemed just as dead as the world she had come from.

"Why is it changing?" Natalie, the Dratini around her neck, spoke for the first time. It was a soft whisper.

"Because... it's not certain yet... we still don't know what's going to happen. Or, you don't."

"Why am I being shown all this?"

"That's the question. You live to heal. You saved me from certain death in the ocean, you heal everything around you... But you still can't fix your own issue."

"Issue? Look at what's happened to me?! I've lost almost everything I ever cared about! The entire CONTINANT I lived on is destroyed, my family is gone... all I have left are Beryl, my pokemon, the friends I made along this journey... The past is...gone..." Sudden realization hit Meredith.

"All I have left, is the future I want to work towards. All that's left is.. whatever I want."

For a moment, reality shimmered to the green, renewed world, until turning to white nothingness around Meredith, and her pokemon. Scizor looked around, and suddenly, his emotions turned to pure rage.
"No! NO! She FIGURED IT OUT!! WHY ARE WE STILL HERE?!!"
He slashed at the nothingness, and a hole appeared in it. Meredith looked inside, and saw a young boy, with green hair..

"Is that...Beryl? Am I seeing... His struggle?"

 

[shadow_lugia]

Re: After the End

Thorn and Blaze now walked the empty streets. They were following the pawprints, wondering what had happened to the Blaze of the past.

The pawprints came to an abrupt stop.

The last thing of Thorn's past was gone forever.

She didn't know why, but every time she started thinking of something, she began to think of quotes from books she had read.

"It shows us what we want... whatever we want..."

"Yes and no. It shows us nothing more or less than the deepest, most desperate desire of our hearts."

Yes, it all made sense, she thought. Her past was completely gone. All that was left were the same locations she had been, but they weren't the same places. Her home was not home. Her future was unbounded by her past.

Wait...

That's what's happening here!

Whoever sent us here could not evolve Blaze. He only evolves through the touch of a Fire Stone. So they sent us here with the Fire Stone I left behind... to completely get rid of my past.

I have nothing but memories now.

She felt excited. Lonely, but excited. She could decide what she wanted to do, not based on what she had done.

The deepest, most desperate desire of our hearts.

She knew what hers was.

"We do have a possibility, Blaze... We had false hope before. We were influenced by our pasts... But now they're gone, and we are free."

 

[Alliniere]

Re: After the End

Watching Beryl's past, trying not to feel like she was spying on him, Meredith had reached the same conclusion as Thorn. While their pasts had made them who they were, the end of the world had erased their pasts. Even restored, humanity and pokemon alike will never be the same, knowing what can happen, and what had happened to their world. For a second, Meredith wondered if anyone whould know, or believe, their story.

'Wouldn't that be a conversation. Being able to say you saved the world."

Not to get ahead of herself, Meredith kept watching her boyfriend, wondering when she would get to reach out to him.

 

[Meririn]

Re: After the End

There. It wasn't that Beryl heard anything consciously, because he didn't. Rather, he sensed something, perhaps a leaf had rustled half a second before the rest of the trees did in the wind, and he knew with an awful certainty that he was no longer alone. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up. Yes. Now he could hear he couldn't before. Breathing. To anyone else, it would have been invisible, but Beryl's fear amplified it until it seemed to be shouting at him. With a degree of worry, he wondered if what he did next would change things - if his parents never would take him to Sinnoh and then never let him out of the mansion again, if as a result his Pokemon would never evolve and he was not there to save the trapped Eevees in his house. But there was no turning back now. The breathing halted in anticipation. The time was now.

Beryl stopped breathing, too.

The spores that fell around him were glittery and blue. They were like a light mist on the breeze. Atalanta, who was at the moment downwind of it, curled up and fell asleep. Beryl did, too - the first time. This time, he let his eyelids slowly drift closed as though he really had inhaled the Sleep Powder, sagging back. He did not know what happened for a good six hours now, but he would find out a part of that soon. As he made to fall to the ground, he found himself caught by a pair of strong arms.

"Good. He's worth less if he hurts himself. Bellossom, return," a woman said.

"Hah! Look at this brat. I can't believe they needed us to kidnap him," the man holding Beryl said in a rumbling voice.

"You know how breeders are. Don't want to get their hands dirty mucking with the competition. How much do you think his parents will pay for their only heir?" the female said. Now they were walking away from the school. The bell signifying that lunch was halfway over rang in the distance.

The man laughed. "You know they had to do in vitro eight times to have him, right? This little nancy boy could probably bag us the house and all the butlers," he informed his partner.

The last toll of the bell was our of earshot.

"I'm not a nancy boy," Beryl said.

It was suprisingly easy to manoeuvre himself from the arms of his masculine kidnapper. Flailing like a Persian in a pillowcase tended to have that effect on shocked people. "What the f-" he started. The female - Beryl shuddered seeing her, he remembered her face from his nightmares - dove for him, but he rolled when he fell and got his feet under him. As she caught her balance, he leapt for her and successfully tackled her down. With one hand on her neck, he grabbed a twig from the forest floor and held it millimetres from her right eye.

"Back off, or she'll be wearing an eyepatch if I can't strangle her first," Beryl hissed. The man dropped his Poke Ball in shock. "You think this is a good line of work? Kidnapping children to scare their parents into paying you? Do you enjoy preying on the weak and scaring them?" The green-haired youth glared at both of them. "If you get your way, you're going find out that my parents would rather try to hire a private eye than pay you straight up. You're going to stoop to no end to scare me while they're on the phone, beginning with sending them locks of my hair and needles filled with my blood and ending with telling them that they need three million yen for every limb they want back. And you know what? In the end, the police do catch you. So let's just skip it all." By now, Beryl was nearly shaking with memories, but doing his best to seem composed. "You're going to let me walk back to my school and you're going to reconsider your career paths, or she's going to lose an eye and you're both going to get 20-life when they connect you with the kidnappings of other rich kids," he stated. Then he got up and ran, not bothering to look back.

"Calydon? You followed them?" he asked as the Eevee appeared not 20 feet from where he had attacked his assailants and ran with him. The little Pokemon chirped in the positive. Neither of them stopped before they were back on school grounds, panting, but victorious. Beryl picked up the knocked-out Atalanta and flopped down beside his scattered belongings. 'Being brave isn't as dangerous as it looks,' he tentatively decided. Then another thought occured to him, and he flushed with happiness. 'Wait until Milanda hears about this!'

 

[Alliniere]

Re: After the End

Meredith pushed on the 'bubble' separating her from her green-haired love.
"Beryl!" She broke through, and as she did, her pokemon vanished behind her.
With a twisting a turning motion, that made her sick to her stomach, she fell into Beryl's world. Opening her eyes, she saw Beryl, at his current age, and immediately hugged him close to her body.

"I saw everything... I'm so sorry that happened to you..... We should finish this, Beryl. We're almost there, I can tell. We've passed... whoever is doing this.. we've passed their test... I just hope that Thorn and Cal have as well".

She closed her eyes, and felt herself fall one more time.

"Where are you, God of Pokemon?"