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It was mid-afternoon at the end of August, and Lance Tatsumi was down in the Dragon’s Den, where he’d spent almost every waking moment since he’d turned twelve.
At some point in the last few years, the adults who kept Blackthorn City functional had made a joint decision that they’d allow the kids to receive their first pokémon at the age of twelve—provided they could pass a test given to them by Pike Tatsumi first. As the wilderness encroached on the isolated village, it became less safe for the children to walk around without pokémon of their own to defend them—and there just weren’t enough adults left to keep a close eye on the forty children orphaned or semi-orphaned by the plague.
Aeron had managed to talk the Indigo League champion into writing an exception into the rule books for the kind of situation the people of Blackthorn had found themselves in, even. They weren’t allowed to take on any of the gyms or challenge the league, but they were given provisional licences and allowed to use pokéballs as a result.
Lance was mostly unaware of the politics of it all, having only been vaguely aware of Kajitani’s visit to the mountainous settlement a year or so prior. The part that mattered the most to him was that his birthday had only been a week ago, and he’d earned his grandfather’s approval and been given a dratini egg of his own.
Lance had barely put the egg down since he’d been given it. He was eager to hatch it and meet the pokémon inside, as well as join his not-quite-brothers, not-quite-siblings Kobe and Vince in their daily training regimens.
And once his new friend got strong enough, Lance would be able to travel to Mahogany Town all by himself instead of having to ask one of the den’s resident dragonite to fly him there. His best friend Rune lived there, and he was beyond excited about the prospect of being able to visit without inconveniencing Emperor to do so.
Emperor who, at that very moment, Lance was sitting beside, his back resting against the dragonite’s paler belly scales as the giant dragon basked in the sun. Lance’s unhatched egg was sitting in his lap, and Lance himself was all but asleep, the warmth of the sun lulling him towards an unplanned nap as surely as it did any dragon in the den. Lance had heard, somewhere, that being around pokémon was a requirement for a pokémon egg to hatch—and he wasn’t sure he was pokémon enough to count. He might’ve had sharp teeth and short claws and eyes as red as Emperor’s, but he was still more or less human on the outside.
Pokémon eggs were strange things, really. Lance had been expecting a hard shell, like a food egg—but the dratini egg he’d been given had a light, leathery, almost soft shell, through which the baby pokémon’s heartbeat could be felt. He wondered what the difference was. None of the dragonite in the Den would explain it to him.
Lance was right on the edge of surrendering to the instinctive urge to fall asleep when he heard a splashing sound nearby. He almost ignored it, and then he heard another. He opened his eyes and looked towards the lake, blinking sleepily.
There was a magikarp right on the lake shore, splashing around where the water got shallow enough that it couldn’t swim under its own power. The red-scaled, golden-finned carp wriggled and bounced around for a bit, and then it managed to throw itself clear of the water entirely.
Lance watched, brows knit together in a frown, as the magikarp flopped its way across the cavern floor towards the hand-carved stairs up to the city proper.
“Emperor? Did you see that?” Lance asked the dragonite in the dragon-pokémon language, not quite sure he hadn’t dreamt it.
“They do that,” Emperor responded. He didn’t sound concerned.
“Why?”
“Don’t know,” came the disinterested answer.
Lance considered for a moment. Emperor was unlikely to move until the sun reached the far side of the cavern, so it should be safe for him to leave for a moment to find out what on earth that silly fish was doing. “Papa? Would you watch my egg for me for a minute?”
“Mmhmm.” Emperor didn’t so much as twitch as Lance carefully laid the egg in the crook of his elbow.
“Thank you,” Lance murmured, pressing his forehead against Emperor’s shoulder for a moment before he got up and hurried in the direction the errant magikarp had gone.
By the time he caught up to the fish, the pokémon was halfway up the stairs. Lance stooped down and made a careful grab for its tail, just above the fin, then swung it up into his arms to hold it firmly against its chest.
“What?” the magikarp demanded, wriggling furiously.
“What are you doing?” Lance asked it.
“I have to Go,” the magikarp answered.
“Go where?”
“I have to Go,” the pokémon repeated.
“There’s no water up there anymore,” Lance told it. “It fell into the Den when the roof collapsed during the war.”
“I have to Go,” the magikarp insisted, struggling to escape Lance’s grasp.
Unfortunately for the magikarp, it wasn’t strong enough to break the grip of a determined twelve year old. Lance carried it back down into the Dragon’s Den, over to the water’s edge, and gently tossed it back into the deeper water.
The magikarp floundered for a moment, disoriented, then swam slowly off towards the middle of the lake.
Lance watched it go, frowning.
“That your first time seeing one of them do that?” a voice asked from Lance’s right, and he turned to see Kobe, his serpent-like dratini draped around his shoulders.
“Do they do that a lot?” Lance asked him.
“Every now and again,” Kobe answered. The thirteen-year-old reached up to run a hand through his short, dark blue hair, fangs flashing as he let out an amused little huff. “You’ve pretty much figured out what to do—just grab em and toss em back into the water. If you let them get a little way away from the water first, they don’t try again for a while.”
“What are they doing?”
“We don’t know. They just suddenly get it into their heads they have to go, and they go.” Kobe shrugged. “If they make it to the top they end up pidgeot bait, and when me and Vince came down here we felt pretty bad about it, so we started tossing them back.”
“Weird,” Lance muttered.
“Yeah. There’s probably some sort of reason for it, but they don’t know how to explain it. Just—” Kobe spread his arms out, palms held up “—gotta Go.”
Lance laughed, shaking his head. “Silly fish. I should probably go grab my egg before Emperor gets bored.”
“Alright—let me know if you need anything. Me and Vince are gonna be doing our drills over on the other side of the Den.”
Lance nodded, then turned back towards the giant dragonite who was still lying in the sun, the egg turned under his arm.
He thought about the magikarp as he walked back towards his father’s old partner. He’d gotten the impression that most humans scorned the fish, since they were mostly inedible to humans and not useful in battle—but Lance wasn’t sure he agreed. Sure, that one was a bit silly—the nearest river was far enough away that it wouldn’t have made it before a hungry bird swept down on it—but they were otherwise surprisingly hardy creatures. It was no wonder they’d spread so far across the country, despite only having been discovered twenty or so years ago. Maybe the desire to Go had been responsible for that, too?
Emperor stirred as Lance approached, one large, red eye cracking open to peer at him. “Curiosity satisfied?”
Lance shrugged, unknowingly echoing Kobe’s earlier gesture. “It had to Go.”
Emperor snorted in amusement, then rolled over slightly to let Lance take the egg back, his movements slow and mindful of Lance’s smallness and frailness compared to his own hatchlings. Lance lifted the egg with the utmost gentleness, cradling it against his chest as he waited for Emperor to get comfortable again, then settled himself own against the dragonite’s belly once more. The egg was a warm weight in his arms, the steady heartbeat of the baby dratini inside fluttering against his fingertips.
“I hope you decide to come out soon,” Lance murmured to the egg, resting his face against the velvety shell. “I can’t wait to meet you, or to introduce you to my family and my friend.”
A smile flickered across Emperor’s scaly face as he closed his eyes. Glaive had been so worried about his hatchling, even before he’d gotten sick, but he really shouldn’t have been. Lance was going to do fine.