Chapter Text
Once upon a time—or more accurately, the tired Tuesday night before Ash officially began his new life of Education and Studying at the Pokémon School—Ash and Professor Kukui were just about to start eating dinner.
But before any of that could happen, Kukui said something over to Ash with a smile. Ash would describe it as ‘something’, and not in words, because Ash actually did not have a singular clue what Kukui had just said.
Ash sent a Confused Look over the table before he could stop himself.
Kukui looked away, faintly awkward. “Oh, that was Alolan,” he said. “I kind of forgot you don’t speak it. I’m used to speaking in both Alolan and Unovian with the people here.”
Ash blinked. “The people here have their own language?”
“Yeah, though it uh,” Kukui frowned, “fell out of use when we were a part of Unova. It’s only in the past few decades we’ve properly tried to revive the language, which is why so much of everything is still in Unovian.”
‘Fell out of use’ was a kind way for Kukui to say ‘Unova banned us speaking the language to the point where almost everyone forgot it and I am very Angry about it’. He had a lot of Feelings about that topic. But he knew it wouldn’t be very good to have a rant—ahem, passionate speech—about why it was completely and undeniably immoral to invade a region and ban their native language, customs and culture, so Kukui just decided to leave his message at that and have that conversation another time.
It wouldn’t do very well to scare the kid away within 10 hours of meeting him, after all.
Kukui instead continued what he was saying . “You won’t be expected to learn Alolan or anything like that, so don’t wo—”
“But can I though?!” Ash cut Kukui off, dinner cruelly abandoned for the conversation, with an excitement on his face so bright Kukui almost expected him to burst into a ball of light any second. Almost, key word, because that was a metaphor and logically would never happen.
Only when Ash sheepishly sat down (Kukui questioned himself when he stood up in the first place) did Kukui realise he’d been silent.
“Sorry, I just get really excited about learning languages. I only know three,”—only three? Kukui wondered in shock, because knowing three languages was not something to be preceded by ‘only’—“but they’re so fun to learn!”
Kukui, lost somewhere in the revelation that the 12-year-old kid in front of him was trilingual, stared blankly ahead for a moment.
(Well, maybe Ash wasn’t twelve, but Kukui didn’t know that. Ash at the very least looked twelve. And that fact was all pretty much anyone had to base Ash’s age off of—some vague accident, maybe that thing where he saw Ho-oh or something to do with the six times he’d died or maybe even that one time he’d time travelled somehow froze his age and twisted it all up like a bunch of metal chain necklaces hopelessly knotted together, the truth of it lost somewhere in all the tangles to the point where not even Ash knew his own age, really.)
(But that was another story. It was, coincidentally, also one which a single search on this cursed website could easily find so the author wasn’t going to bother telling it. For now, anyway.)
In some unspecified time during the narrator’s hopeless rambling, Kukui realised himself and began talking again. Like a functional human being. Which nobody in this entire plot line, not even the author who created it, could be referred to as—hence why the word ‘like’ was used instead of one of the many conjugations of the verb ‘to be’ so as to not possibly insinuate that a character was a Functioning Person.
“Of course you can! I think I still have some of Burnet’s old textbooks somewhere…” he muttered.
Ash, once again, was Lost by Kukui saying things which he had no clue of the meaning to. So, once again, Kukui got hit dead on with the same Confused Look of not five minutes earlier.
“Oh! Burnet is an, uh,” Kukui… blushed? “old friend.”
“Ah,” Ash said in understanding while not understanding at all.
Being a twelve(??)-year-old, Ash as of yet Did Not Understand the powers of romance and love and as such thought it was Weird that adults and teenagers and Brock, mostly Brock, always swooned over people that were even vaguely nice to look at. But Ash didn’t mention it, because Iris (and a lot of other people too, but Iris stood out) always said that he should understand it, which was fine except for the undeniable part where he did not, and his repeated attempts to try to understand it all only resulted in him being even more confused than before except now unable to ask for guidance on the subject out of an unwillingness to be ridiculed again.
This is a Thing which would be touched upon had this piece of classic literature come under the genre of ‘slice-of-life where Kukui aggressively parents Ash’. However, since the genre is more accurately defined—the word ‘accurately’ is used loosely because the author isn’t quite sure where this story is going yet—as ‘Ash learns Hawaiian Alolan while we all laugh at the jokes in the story, provided the author actually lands them, no pressure’, this topic will once again Not Be Covered. For now, anyway.
“I’ll get her books from the basement tonight.”
—
True to Kukui’s word, several well-loved textbooks appeared in the loft which was now Ash’s bedroom about an hour before Ash was supposed to go to bed.
However. When faced with a crossroad, where one, sensible path represented ‘sleep’ and the other represented ‘learning another language’, Ash didn’t even think before completely forgoing the sensible option. This was for several reasons: 1) Ash generally completely ignored the sensible option in most situations, deciding immediately on the most chaotic and grey-hair-inducing (for everyone around him) option, and; b) Ash just really, really liked to learn new languages.
“I mean,” Ash had gushed to Clemont in Kalosian, ignoring Clemont’s winces at the grammatical mistakes (because in his defence he had only been learning Kalosian for, like, two months, and he thought he was doing pretty well), “isn’t it all just so cool! How the way people speak is just so different, but at the same time it’s really similar, and you’ve got all these little phrases in each language that can’t really be translated because they’re things that are only really in that one region, and—”
Ash hadn’t been cut off after that. In actual fact, he continued that near incomprehensible gushing for another five minutes, going on and on about how insane it was that people in completely different places managed to obtain extremely similar features of language without any sort of coordination, but Clemont just stopped listening and went back to building his latest invention. Which blew up in his face an hour later. But that’s irrelevant.
So, back to the actual story. Ash opened the textbook and went immediately to the first chapter—titled, nicely enough, ‘Alola’.
Ash, a fool, thought, hey! I know this one—it means ‘hello’!
And the textbook, devilish and evil and full of trickery, replied, ha bitch you thought.
So concluded the story of Ash learning that ‘alola’ did not, in fact, mean ‘hello’. It actually meant ‘love’. And, in an explanation that was far too technical for beginners of a language, the book also explained that the word ‘alola’ could be used in several ways.
These ways included: as a noun or verb, meaning ‘love’; as a greeting, either ‘hello’ or ‘goodbye’, generally the most common usage heard (but keeping the previous definition in mind, this was more accurately a reminder of love than a simple greeting); a rather complex system of beliefs which boiled down to a simple yet powerful idea of respecting and caring for everyone around you, and finally; just plain referring to the region itself.
Ash thought the many meanings of ‘alola’ were great. Wonderful, actually. But this complexity was most definitely not the first thing Ash needed to find out about the language he was about to learn, and he was beginning to regret not just going to sleep an hour ago.
—
There was a well-known legend in the Alola region.
One day, many many years ago, a Man followed destiny and was brought to an island.
The Guardian of the island showed themselves to Him, and the Man looked at them, yellow as lightning and the morning sun, and He said: “I seeeth thou. Thine land in thou ocean shalt henceforth be namenth ‘Yellow Island’.”
The Guardian trilled in approval, and the Man followed destiny to the next isle.
Once again, the Guardian showed themselves to him. The Man looked at them, purple as the ocean at the peak of dusk, and said: “I knoweth now. Thine island shalt from thise day onwords be knoweth as ‘Purple Island’.”
The Guardian nodded their approval, and the Man followed destiny to the third isle.
Upon arriving, the Man was once again greeted (loved) by the Guardian of the Isle. And the Man looked upon them, red as—wait, isn’t this the plant Guardian? Shouldn’t they be green?—uh, the roses as they bloom in fields of endless grass? Wait, no, that’s still kind of green. Ah well. And the Man said: “From now thise is trueth. Thine home shalt forever more beeth called ‘Red Island’.”
The Guardian showed their approval, and the Man moveth on, following destiny to the last island.
The Guardian of the last island showed themselves to Him, and the Man set His sight upon them, pink as… well, psychic energy had to be given a colour, right? And He said: “I understandeth now. Thine island shalt be giveth the name ‘Pink Island’.”
As with all old legends, they meant nothing unless they had some inexplicable connection to the present timeline. By ‘inexplicable’, the narrator means ‘only possible through the precise planning of an author’. Or of a God. Those words were, generally, synonymous anyway.
So in order to show this magical connection we must pay a visit to a certain classroom on a certain island, where a child of ambiguous age was focused solely on a textbook while the rest of the class engaged in a lesson on a language he already knew.
(That was Kantonian. Kukui had decided to let Ash self-study Alolan while he taught the rest of the class Kantonian, because he figured there was no point having Ash actually take part in that class, considering Kantonian was Ash’s entire native language.)
Ash had finished wrapping his head around the confusing section titled ‘Alola’, and had moved on to the ‘colours’ part of the book. Which was, thankfully, much nicer.
Melemele — yellow
ʻUlaʻula — red
Ash paused. Those words were strangely familiar to him, and he didn’t know why.
He kept reading.
Akala — pink
Poni — purple
He stared at it, confused, until it all clicked into place and there was nothing reasonable to do except slam his head roughly into the desk in disappointment.
The class went silent. For all of one moment, anyway, until it became too unbearable for Sophocles to bear and he burst out with: “Are you okay?”
Ash inhaled deeply. And dramatically, but nobody tell him that. Then he exhaled, equally deeply and dramatically, before widely gesturing and asking, “Who named it yellow island?”
Lana let her lips slide into a grin, unable to stop herself beginning the story. “See, once upon a time there was a Man—”
“No, there wasn’t,” Mallow corrected. She turned to Ash. “Nobody really knows who named the islands after colours.”
Oh, sorry, did the author say this story was well-known? She lied. She made it up on the spot.
—
“Say, Ash, are you learning Alolan on Duolingo too?” Lillie asked once class was over.
She said this with a perfectly innocent tone, but beneath there was a barely concealed ruthlessness. The rest of the class froze, and Lillie internally smirked, confident in the fact that she had drawn another unsuspecting person into the wrath of the green Noctowl.
Ah, how sweet life was. She couldn’t wait to crush another person in the weekly rankings.
“What’s Duolingo?” Ash asked, painfully ignorant of the pain that lay in wait.
“It’s an app where we all get voluntarily harassed by a green Noctowl into learning a new language,” Mallow said, before shivering violently. It was a good thing Kukui wasn’t there, because had he overheard this conversation he would have been Very Concerned about the overall well-being of these children.
“It’s fun, really! You should download it!” Lillie said and reached for Ash’s phone and going straight into the App Store to search it up. A few seconds later, Ash’s phone was handed back to him, the painfully bare home screen containing One New App.
(Sophocles had gotten a glimpse at how empty Ash’s phone was, with the default background and no apps beyond the pre-downloaded ones, and immediately felt a lone tear run down his cheek. Really, he thought, how could one be so cruel as to not even personalise a phone? Even Kiawe had a custom profile picture—one of him and his little sister—so Sophocles Did Not Understand how Ash, the kid who duelled Tapu Koko, like, yesterday, hadn’t figured out the setting to change the background.)
(In Ash’s defence, since the author would’ve felt bad if she didn’t explain all sides of the issue, he had only owned the phone for a week after his mother had Freaked Out about all the Things that happened in Kalos (and the supreme lack of contact from Ash to, well, anyone) and so had finally forced him along to a shop and bought him a phone, in the hopes that her ridiculous child would finally learn to communicate with someone.)
“It is not fun,” Kiawe pointed out in protest to Lillie’s declarations. “I keep losing my streak! And then Duo keeps sending me emails with sad faces, saying I’ve made it feel bad, and then I feel bad and I’ve gotta get back into it even if I don’t want to but I’m always too busy so I can never keep it up. Then the same thing happens all over again!”
“It’s manipulation,” Lana said in a cold voice, “manipulation in its finest form. It’s taking advantage of all our naturally kind and caring natures and exploiting them for its own capitalistic profit.”
Sophocles frowned. “Your nature isn’t ‘kind and caring’ enough to be moved by Duolingo’s sadness. And it’s free, anyway, so it doesn’t take any money from you unless you’re Lillie and you feel the need to buy Duolingo Plus.”
“It means I can get all the lessons offline!” Lillie objected. Everyone ignored her.
During all of this arguing, Ash had opened the app and began creating a new account. He put in his email—frowning at the reminder of how his mother hadn’t let him choose ‘pokemonmaster’ for the first part of his email and had instead been forced into ‘satoshiaketchum’—and typed ‘Ash’ into the username box.
The box lit up red and told him to choose another name.
“What do you mean I can’t be Ash, I am Ash,” he muttered in frustration. Pikachu, just now being edited in by the author (you’ll understand in about 700 words!), snickered slightly and refused to try explain to Ash what he was doing wrong.
There was what one may call a misunderstanding between Ash and Duolingo at this point. When Duolingo said ‘please choose another name’, it meant that ‘someone has already taken this username and we require everyone who registers to have a unique username because that is how we identify people’. However, when Ash saw ‘please choose another name’, he immediately drew the conclusion that Duolingo was saying ‘hi, sorry, your real life name can’t be Ash so you have to change it if you want to sign up’.
The arguing continued. So did Ash’s glare at his phone.
Had Misty been here, she would have taken one look at Ash and laughed at him for being extremely out-of-touch with all technology outside of pokédexes and those calling machines found in pokémon centres, then Ash would’ve frowned playfully at her, and Misty would after several minutes finally taken pity on him and showed him how to do what he wanted to do.
But Misty wasn’t here.
Eventually, Mallow, who was not quite as invested in the discussion as everyone else but was rather more content in providing small comments every now and again, filled Misty’s role and took pity on Ash, scooting her seat over to see what was wrong.
“It’s not letting me choose Ash as a name,” Ash explained.
Mallow smiled in amusement. “That’s because it’s a username, and it has to be different to all the names everyone else has signed up with.”
Oh, Ash realised dumbly. It was like the email his mother had forced him into making. He blinked. “Oh. What should I make it then?”
“Anything you want.”
Ash gently placed the phone down as if it symbolised centuries of hardship and one wrong move would immediately destroy the universe. “This is so much pressure,” he said, before turning to everyone else and raising his voice. “Guys! What should my username be!”
The passionate argument stopped immediately, suggesting that perhaps it was not quite as passionate as one may think.
“Well, I just made mine ‘Kiawe’ with a bunch of numbers after it,” Kiawe said.
Sophocles frowned in distaste. “Coward.”
“You could be ‘PokemonMaster’!” Lillie suggested.
Ash considered it. “That’s nice, but I tried that with my email and my mum didn’t like it and I don’t like making her feel bad.”
It wasn’t that his mum didn’t like it, per se. Just she thought it was rather unprofessional for an email. That reasoning would, therefore, not transfer to the choosing of a Duolingo username, but Ash (a dumbass in the field of all things common-sensical) did not realise that and so didn’t choose PokemonMaster as a username.
“I made mine ‘ruleroftheseas’,” Lana said.
“Mine is ‘lils’!” Lillie proudly announced.
Sophocles looked at her in a strange concoction of disbelief and awe. Well, thinking about it, the combination wasn’t actually that strange—supposing that something is particularly awe-inspiring, the reason for it being awe-inspiring generally would have something to do with how few people manage to pull off the feat, therefore making it unbelievable that it would actually happen—and the author is going to shut up with her rambling and continue with the story now.
“Yeah, Lillie somehow managed to get her username to be her nickname, even though her name is much more common than any of ours, and whenever I try to get the username ‘sophocles’ or even ‘sophy’ it’s always taken,” he explained. “Actually, me and Lana have a conspiracy theo—”
Lana firmly slammed her hand over Sophocles’ mouth. “We do not speak of such matters in front of these… unworthy people,” she hissed.
Naturally, not a word of this was true. Lana just really liked to mess with people, and everyone knew that Lana just really liked to mess with people, yet every time she attempted to pull something of this manner off, she executed it with such believability that nobody really knew whether she was joking or not for at least a small moment.
Unbeknownst to any of the conversing children, Pikachu—who the author most definitely did not forget to write in this scene (she’s even going to edit in a mention earlier on to prove it!)—had picked up Ash’s phone and was typing in, clumsily, what he believed was the best name.
All of the other fields had been filled out. This was the last one.
And so, with an evil smirk on his face, Pikachu typed ‘AshyBoi’ as the username and created the account before Ash had any idea what had happened. He knew Ash would despise it. Ash hated that nickname, and even though Pikachu had pretty much fully warmed to his trainer, there was still a hint of mischievousness from the first time they met that stayed as stubbornly in his personality as his love for ketchup.
The poor fool. It was truly a shame that Ash didn’t know a thing about technology and so wouldn’t be able to change the name, otherwise Pikachu wouldn’t be able to get the full delight from his own actions.
“You should do ‘GottaBefriendEmAll’!” Mallow suggested, “You know, like that phrase that goes ‘gotta catch em all’, but since you just make friends with all the pokémon instead of trying to catch them.”
Ash had no idea whether he had just been complimented or offended. But, thinking strongly about that entire deal with Paul, he was going to take it as a compliment since his tried-and-trusted method of either adopting pokémon or having them adopt him hadn’t failed him yet. Apart from in those first few (many) battles against Paul where he lost. But, he won in the end, so he wasn’t thinking about that.
“Sounds cool!” Ash said. “I like that one the most!”
Mallow beamed. Kiawe frowned. “That’s the only suggestion you’ve had so far,” he pointed out.
Ash shrugged as if that was irrelevant. Which, to him, it was.
Ash picked up his phone to type it in, not questioning how it had suspiciously slid half a ruler’s length to the left, but recoiled in surprise when he saw the ‘Account Creation’ screen had disappeared, instead replaced with a bunch of grey circles labelled with different symbols and a purple one at the top, called ‘Intro’.
“The thingy is gone,” Ash said.
“Huh?” Mallow said. She took the phone from his hands, and unlike literally every other young person on the planet who was ridiculously protective of their phones, Ash let her without any issue. “So it is.”
She messed with the app a little, and a few taps later, she was holding out a settings page—showing proudly at the top Ash’s nice, new, shiny username.
AshyBoi.
Ash inhaled, very sharply, and turned to stare at Pikachu with only a tiny hint of betrayal. Okay, perhaps it was more than a little, but Ash wasn’t particularly willing to admit that.
Pikachu couldn’t hold it in any longer. He doubled over laughing, almost falling off the table he had sat on and sending poor Lillie, who was standing next to said table, flying away as he struggled to keep himself upright.
“Why,” Ash asked. Later, he would fervently deny that his voice broke.
“What’s—What’s AshyBoi? An old nickname?” Sophocles asked.
Ash nodded, tightening his lips and accepting his fate. “My old rival, Gary—we’re kinda friends now but he’s still a jerk, he always will be—he used to call me that. It was so annoying, especially since we grew up together and he’s been using it my whole life.”
Sophocles, without a trace of sympathy, laughed.
Lillie, however, frowned, because there was something extremely familiar about that. Then it clicked. “You grew up in Pallet Town, right?”
“Yeah,” Ash confirmed.
(“How did she remember that?” Sophocles asked.
“He mentions it at least once per day,” Kiawe said drily, “It’s pretty easy to remember.”)
Lillie’s eyes sparkled in the way only a fangirl’s (or fanboy’s, this fanfiction may be completely crack but at least it’s gender-equal) did when they were about to meet their favourite actor. “You mean Professor Gary Oak?! The guy who’s already revolutionised the field of fossil research even though he’s only a little older than us?!”
Lana looked at Lillie, slightly intimidated.
“Who’s Gary Oak?” Mallow asked, clueless.
Sophocles sent her a betrayed glare. “Professor Oak’s grandson?”
Realisation dawned in Mallow’s eyes. “Oh! Our principal’s first cousin twice removed! Gotcha,” she said, as if her words hadn’t obliterated three of her classmates on the spot.
The reason for those three classmates’ obliteration could be split into two near categories. First, there was Lillie and Sophocles—whose prides as aspiring scientists and/or researchers (those were essentially the same thing, but don’t tell them that) were deeply hurt because they had studied both Professor Gary Oak’s and Samuel Oak’s works in far too much detail for either of them to be recognised not for their achievements, but rather for the relation to the school principal who makes far too many bad puns to be taken seriously.
Second, there was Ash, who took great delight in Mallow’s words and fully intended to refer to Gary as nothing other than ‘the principal’s distant cousin’. In fact, he was definitely changing Gary’s contact name to that. (If he could figure out how to do that. He had heard that was a thing that could be done, Dawn was always going on about her ever-changing nicknames for all her friends on her phone, but Ash didn’t actually know how it worked. He’d ask her later.)
Mallow rolled her eyes playfully at her classmates’ shock. Lillie and Sophocles glared at her—Sophocles definitely didn't do it out of any real anger, but Lillie’s glare was too foreign on her face for anyone to be sure of whether it was genuine or not—and Mallow lightly shoved them on their shoulders to snap them out of it.
She pulled out her phone.
“Now you’ve gotta add us all!” Mallow said, cheerfully thrusting her phone—open to her Duolingo profile, showing her username—in front of Ash.