The fanfic for her

I had seen war of the worlds as a child; something on late night television that made so little sense. A bunch of ships land on planet earth, do nothing for several hours, and then grow tripods as they begin scouring the world for victims to take captive to fuel their atrocious engines. It all seemed so fantastical.


I even played pokemon as a child; collecting them all, 152 in the original game, and so many more as more games came out. I lost track of how many I played, how many I found, how many I trained, named, captured, bred, battled, and just catalogued. All on the screen of a console, where it was fictional, something to play with, pretend with.

It’s been eight years since that game became our reality, and our reality is much more different than the fantasy they’d have you believe from the video games. We don’t know where they came from; we don’t know why they’re here. What we do know, is that they aren’t all the friendly creatures that you see in the cartoons.

Eight years I’ve been hunting the ones that attack people, and eight years we’ve been keeping people safe from the epidemic that they’ve caused.





“Ghost!? Ghost, where are you?” I shook my head, pushing through the underbrush around the outskirts of the village. She always wandered off after we had to drop a big one. I couldn’t blame her for that though, she loved the creatures.

The small pale pink pokemon that always trailed me was trilling as it zipped in and out of the trees and brush, the Myuu looking avidly for my dear partner. “Myuu?” it looked over to me, confused.

“Yes, I know she’s here somewhere. But where the hell did she go?” I knew I shouldn’t have left her alone. Not after that, not after that girl, that village. However I needed to deal with the contract we had taken to dispose of the problem, and she had the tendency to wander off into the shadows the moment I turned my head. She got her name honestly at least. She was a ghost when she wanted to be.

“Ghost! Damn it girl, where the hell did you…” And there she was, as though she were part of the foliage all along. “Fuck you had me worried, where did you go?”

“Look what I found, Liam!” She held it up for me to see. A perfectly round egg, blue on both ends, with brown in the middle and a white stripe separating the colours. It was a mistake the moment I saw it.

“What? Oh, you found its nest, huh? Did you dispose of them all?” I was watching that egg, and myuu had returned to my shoulder, resting on my form with her tail looping around my back and over the other shoulder to thump gently and almost restlessly, against my chest.

“This was the only one. She must have been at the start of her cycle, or maybe she was just too old.” Ghost looked so small in those moments, when she knew what had to be done, but didn’t want to do it herself. Or thought another way was possible. It was always the other ways that had me worried.

“Well, one egg is easy enough, hun. Drop it and let’s move on. We have that Snorlax to deal with in Kempen.”

“No. I want to keep it, Liam.” She took on a stubborn stance, a fierce look in her eyes. Yeah, I knew it was coming, I knew she would want this. I had always been the one to find the eggs, and as far as she knew, I destroyed them all. She always cried those nights after I relocated a nest far from habitation. She wouldn’t speak to me for sometimes days after. This was different though, this was a blastoise egg.

“It’s a pokemon, Ghost. It will eat your face off as often as it is likely to be friendly with you. You don’t want to do this.” I looked at her, and the egg she held in her hands. This already wasn’t looking good. From this distance I could see the ridges across the length of the shell, it was less than a week from hatching.

“Eat my face, huh? Is that why you keep myuu around? Face eating?” Myuu trilled and let off her own call as she darted off my shoulder and into an upper branch ten feet over my head to glare down at Ghost.

“She’s different, you know that. I found her from a hatchling and she’s the most intelligent one we’ve ever seen. She can communicate, Ghost. That… That thing that laid that egg, damn near destroyed that village; and it did drown that child. Damn it, Ghost. You pulled her out of the house.” I was pleading with her, her mind was made up and I had to make her see the flaw in her logic. This wasn’t a game.

The hurt look on her face told me I had hit a mark, yet it didn’t stop her from speaking up anyways, “it’s a baby, Liam. We can teach it better, I know we can. Please?”

“We? Oh no. I want nothing to do with a blastoise egg. Not now, not ever, not in a million years.” I shook my head adamantly, this was not going near as well as I had planned.

“It’s a squirtle egg, Liam. They’re a squirtle before they become a blastoise. I can teach it to be good. He’ll be great if we get attacked by another charizard. Water beats fire, remember?” She looked at my left arm pointedly. It had just healed, and the scar tissue from the vicious burn was tight whenever I had to move the arm at all. She had a point, but it was still a dangerous creature. One of the most.

“No, Ghost. Final answer.” There it was. I had put my foot down, and she was going to listen. Until I saw that crestfallen look, I knew she got the hint, and then those earth brown eyes looked at me, looked through me. I could never deny those eyes. “Damn it Ghost, don’t look at me like that. Stop it.”

“You always used to get me presents.”

“Yes, inanimate presents. Or dead things like flowers. Not bloody eggs of deluge.” This had turned around somewhere. I didn’t know where, but I had a feeling it had started that turn around the same time she had found the egg.

“Well what about Lillith?” She asked, picking up on how cornered she had me. Either seeing it in my eyes, or hearing it in my voice.

“Lillith was different. She was a cat. Cats are of our world. That egg is most certainly not of our world, Ghost.” I was watching it like a coiled arbok about to strike. She knew it, too. Then the worst thing she could have ever done happened.

“Liam, Please…?” I thought was going to cry right there, her sweet brown eyes were misting over. A man could get lost in those eyes, I should know, as I’d been lost in them many times, drowning in the sweet pools of her near pure innocence.

“Fuck. First sign of it turning, and I swear I’ll make the turtle soup myself, Ghost.” I felt my heart melt as she knew she won. The smile that lit her face in these rare moments was worth everything we had to endure on a day to day basis.

She carefully set the egg down in the grass as I let out a slowly resigned sigh. It was still entering my lungs when a mass of beauty plunged into my arms, wrapping around me and pushing the sigh out in a grunting gasp. She showered my face and neck with kisses, “Oh thank you, thank you, thank you! He’ll be as sweet as myuu. Sweeter! I just know it!”

I let my hands trace around her waist to rest upon her hips, gently pushing her away. I hope so, I thought, for all of our sakes. As she collected her egg from the grass I moved through the underbrush where she had come from. If this was going to happen, it was going to be done right.

“Liam? Where are you going? The next town is this way. Liam, where are you…?” She looked through the brush as I vanished into the shadows. “Liam…?”

Her question was answered as I returned with a spare sack layered with soaked moss, and the remnants of the Blastoise nest she had pilfered filling the confines of burlap. I gently shifted the straps around and presented the makeshift carrying nest to her. “Keep it wet or it will die. Now, let’s go little sister.”

There was that smile again. Damn my weakness. She reverently set the egg within the pack and put it on facing forward. It sat comically tilted over her breasts. She must have seen the amusement in my look, because her return glare wasn't the cute smile anymore.

I smiled at her sweetly holding in my laugh as I turned and began to move through the brush as myuu shifted to my shoulder, tail wrapped around my neck to rest across my torso, Ghost, my closest friend, and fellow hunter of seven years, following behind.

With the glory of the sun at our backs, we moved through the game trails. I offered Ghost the pouch of blackberries, keeping several for myself and offering one to myuu upon my shoulder and eating the rest. I took the moment of relaxation in the sun to gauge the time and our distance. We would make the next village by nightfall.

Ironic, given the snorlax that was terrorizing the village would be sleeping and at its strongest by night. It would be a long day travelling, and an even longer night. Life was not the dream it should have been, but nothing is.



To Be Continued.