Chapter Text
Reputations tend to precede their source, and more often than not they prime you for disappointment once you finally meet the real thing. A place gets talked up long enough, and the truth of it, when you finally arrive, rarely measures up to the rumor.
If you’ve grown up in Kanto, or Johto, you’ve heard of Lavender Town. Perhaps the ‘Lavender Town Syndrome Hoax’ springs to mind, if you grew up on the early Internet. If you’re from a certain bygone generation, it’s possible you think of its epithet as ‘The Noble Purple Town’. But the one thing that everyone thinks of, without a singular doubt or exception, is the ghosts.
Supposedly, Lavender Town was haunted.
It’s not for nothing. For a long time, the Pokémon Tower — a towering multi-story mausoleum — has housed the remains of fallen Pokémon from all over the region. Over the course of generations, it became known as a hub of Ghost-Type Pokémon.
There are those who choose to believe that these Ghost-Type Pokémon are the true spirits of the departed, returned to walk the earth in a new form. More skeptical minds would argue that the ‘Ghost-Type’ is just a name, a label given to a number of traits and behaviors that fit what humanity associates with ghost stories. That said, even the most fervent salesmen of the first theory will tell you that there’s a distinction between ‘Ghost-Types’ and ‘ghosts’, and make no mistake: Lavender Town is known for ghosts.
Real ghosts.
The lingering souls of departed humans and Pokémon, not just some living creature that happens to be immune to Normal and Fighting-Type moves.
Or at least, that was its reputation. That reputation has dwindled in recent years, ever since Pokémon Tower was torn down a couple years ago and replaced with the Kanto Radio Station. Since the Radio Station was established, it seems like all those rumors have scattered like ashes on the wind. No ghost sighting has been reported since then, as far as I could tell. No spooky whispers, no darting shadows, not even a whiff of an errant Gastly. No ghosts, and no Ghost-Type Pokémon either.
As rumor has it, Lavender Town is no longer haunted. A major blow to the many paranormal enthusiasts of the world, I’m sure. For me, it’s what brought me to Lavender Town in the first place. The Kanto Radio Station offered incredible money for a nighttime radio engineer to monitor the station throughout the night— it just so happened that I had the connections and qualifications to land the post. But no amount of money, not even 6.5 million Poké Dollars, would be enough for me to step foot in the Radio Station if it were still haunted. Even if it was just by reputation. I wouldn’t want to see anyone’s dead, never mind my own. Not one bit.
I wouldn’t know what to say to them if I did.
Anyone who’s been to the Magnet Train stations in places like Saffron City can tell you what they’re like: crowds moving in that packed, uneven flow unique to a train platform, muttered apologies and the cries of small Pokémon and the click of shoes on tile blurring into a general roar. Chipped paint, unexplained stains the janitorial staff never quite got ahead of, the ordinary wear that comes from actually being used. Whatever else you could say about a station like that, it felt alive.
Lavender Town’s Magnet Train station was offputting, in a sterile sort of way. Everything, from the floor tiles to the signs to the faintly droning fluorescent lights— the only sound in the station besides the automated announcement reels— seemed almost too clean; Everything carried the faint sheen of newness, despite, by all rights, this station being just as old as those in Celadon or Fuschia. A sense of stillness, or perhaps stagnancy clung to everything about the station, despite its modernity. The utter lack of people made the place seem abandoned, almost unwanted.
“It is unwanted. Or rather, unneeded. There's just not much reason to use it,” explained Aoi Koizumi, a family friend who used to always insist on being called ‘big sister’, despite being two years older than my mother. Aunt Aoi was a woman in her early 50s who in many respects reminded me of my grandmother’s exotic rug: warm, slightly frayed, and partially faded— all while persisting with a dignified beauty that hinted that, once upon a time, she was someone breathtakingly vibrant and beautiful. “Most of the population are old folks with little need or desire to go anywhere else.
“Ever since the Pokémon Tower was torn down, the number of visitors has also declined— I guess the House of Memories doesn’t really hold the same appeal. Even the regular trains see less people now, never mind these fancy high-tech bullet trains. What are they called? Mag-Lev? Sounds like one of those new Pokémon from another region.” I listened to her while absently petting her Vulpix. It slumped against my belly, its internal flame making it almost like a furry little heating pad. Its six fluffy tails rhythmically beat against my leg in satisfaction.
As we drove towards her home, I gazed out the window. The mountains cast a shadow over us, tinting everything in their pale purple shadow. A thin white fog clung to the ground, moisture pushed up from the sea to the south that rolled back down the mountains to the north and east every morning. Aunt Aoi’s old station wagon sputtered and groaned as it drove shakily down rural roads as we sat in a companionable silence, punctuated only by the brief chuffs of Vulpix as it twitched in its dreams. A brief feeling of longing surged in my chest that I beat back down with a practiced hand. Dreams are dreams for a reason, and having a Pokémon of my own would’ve only dragged up ideas that were laid to rest a long time ago. I was an adult.
Dreams were for children.
As the asphalt gave way to rural dirt roads, we passed by a screaming man fighting paramedics as he was forcibly strapped to a gurney. Aunt Aoi slowed the car to stare pensively at the scene. Under her breath, she muttered, as though dazed, “...Mr. Akamatsu?”
“SAN SAN SAN SAN! SAN SAN SAN!” the man— Mr. Akamatsu— shrieked at the top of his lungs. His eyes were bulged and bloodshot, and his face was almost purple. I’d never seen a person in that kind of utterly frenzied state before. For a moment, our eyes met through the tinted glass of the car, and a chill shot through my spine. His screams increased in severity, something I hadn’t thought possible. For an older-looking man, he was deceptively strong, at least from what I could tell. The belts on the gurney went taut, and I could imagine the creaking of springs as the metal frame bounced from his thrashing. Once fastened down, the paramedics moved with practiced swiftness, lifting the raving Mr. Akamatsu up and into the ambulance before driving off, lights and sirens blaring.
“Do you... know him?” I asked cautiously.
“He’s our neighbor.” Aunt Aoi murmured, her voice still small and distant. “His son, San Akamatsu... he died in a car accident years ago.”
“His son was named ‘three’?” I asked, baffled.
“No, san as in ‘acid’.” Aoi corrected me absently. “Mr. Akamatsu’s wife came from a line of Poison-Type trainers.”
Oh, that made sense. It was something of a quirk, where people with a family history of raising certain types of Pokémon would name their children in accordance with their specialty, if they didn’t already have a thematic-sounding last name. My father, Raizen Himura, came from a line of Electric-Type specialists, hence the rai kanji in both his and my name, as well as the den kanji in my brother’s. Not that either of us became trainers, anyway.
One of us didn’t even get the chance. The dark remark bubbled up in my mind before I could think to suppress it. I pressed my lips together tightly.
“Did you know him well?”
“He’s been missing for months. We used to talk to each other quite often before that. Our families were close. I... I used to babysit San... He was around your age.” she whispered. She sagged in her seat, and her white knuckles gripped the steering wheel as though it was the only thing holding her up.
The sight of his eyes, wide and gripped with madness flashed in my mind. It occurred to me in the way a winter wind bites into exposed skin— That man, Mr. Akamatsu, had a son. A family. A life. I had never known him in my life, the first I’d seen of him was clearly him in some kind of mental crisis, but he can’t have always been that way. Something happened to him.
Neither of us said much after that. The dregs of small talk we managed to exchange during our drive died off completely.
Aunt Aoi’s home was a sprawling, old-style manor on the foothills of the mountains east of Lavender Town. There were a couple other homes like it, each one spaced out generously with large swaths of land between them. Presumably, one of them belonged to the Akamatsu family. The Kanto Radio Station, formerly the Pokémon Tower, was only a thirty-minute bike ride from here, at about the halfway point between Aoi’s place and the heart of Lavender Town proper.
Aside from the wild Pokémon on the property, the manor’s only inhabitants were Aoi and Vulpix. It was pretty traditional— several buildings arranged in a complex around a central rock garden. The roofs were a distinctive, deep purple, curved with deep overhanging eaves, bracketing the threshold with the dark wood engawa. The interiors were a maze of sliding fusuma doors and tatami mats. It was almost overwhelming in its emptiness.
As I murmured a “pardon my intrusion” when entering, it wasn’t a mere formality— I was genuinely an intruder here. The vastness of the space, the age of it, almost seemed to swallow up the woman and her Vulpix— never mind a guest like myself. This place was built long before Aunt Aoi, and it would long outlast her...
As we sat for dinner, the reason for the emptiness became known. Over a simple meal of curry and rice, Aoi disclosed her circumstances; She and her husband Ryutaro, moved to Lavender Town to care for Ryutaro’s ailing parents. They weren’t the best parents to Uncle Ryutaro, and they were even worse in-laws to Aoi. Despite that, Ryutaro dropped everything to move from Saffron City to Lavender Town. For a city girl like Aoi Koizumi, née Shimizu, the shift was jarring. The in-laws didn’t help matters; their sickness only deepened their bitterness. They would constantly nitpick her, berating her over nothing at all. When Aunt Aoi and Uncle Ryutaro had issues having children, that was only another wound for them to pour their malice into. Eventually, they passed, spewing curses all the while, raging against the night, the day, and all things good and evil. That should have been the end of it.
But then Ryutaro got sick. Metastatic cancer of the bones, seeded by a freak twist of fate and fed and watered by the backbreaking labor of working to support his aging parents and the neglect of his own condition until it was too late. It was already in his lungs and in his brain when he was finally unable to brush aside the headaches and bloody cough as ‘work-related stress’.
When he passed, his hefty life insurance payout was the final insult on top of injury after injury dealt to Aunt Aoi...
“Be kind to her, she’s been through a lot.” Those were the words my mother sent me off with.
Talk about an understatement, Mom. Compared to her, my own pain was nothing worth mentioning.
Maybe that’s why she sent me Aunt Aoi’s way instead of renting a place in town— to learn from her resilience.
“If there’s anything you need me to do, just let me know.” I offered, to which Aunt Aoi only smiled gently and shook her head.
“I’ll do no such thing. You’re going to be working hard enough as it is. The graveyard shift is no joke, young man— no matter how used to all nighters you might be from college. It’ll take a toll. And biking back and forth every morning and night? Are you sure I can’t drive you? It wouldn’t be hard.”
“Not a chance. You’ve done more than enough, Aunt Aoi. Seriously, thank you.” I bowed formally, and seeing the way the older woman flustered was both endearing and heartbreaking in equal measure. She reminded me of a friend of mine, one who wasn’t used to being thanked or recognized.
Was there anything I could do for her? If I offered, she’d probably refuse... maybe I could help out with Vulpix...? Regardless, it was a thought for another time.
When I insisted on helping clean up, I was reluctantly allowed to help with drying and putting away dishes. That night, I slept like a baby, despite not being used to sleeping on the floor.
The next day, I reported to the Kanto Radio Station to receive my entry paperwork and the obligatory orientation tour, handled by a receptionist named Mrs. Tachibana, tired behind a bright, practiced manner that slipped the moment she thought no one was looking. Later that evening, ten minutes before nine, I reported to the daytime radio engineer for the handoff: a spry, sun-spotted man in his sixties named Mr. Ueda, who looked me up and down once, grinned like he'd already decided I was good for a laugh, and got straight to business.
"So you're the one replacing Akamatsu, huh." He didn't wait for an answer before turning back to the equipment rack, running a thumb along a row of dials that didn't need adjusting, the kind of habitual gesture a man develops after decades of keeping his hands near the same machine.
"Akamatsu?" Nobody had given me a name for my predecessor. Only a start date and a stack of forms.
"Renji Akamatsu. Previous nighttime engineer." He said it lightly, the way you'd mention someone who'd moved out of town rather than someone who'd apparently come apart in the middle of a public street a few weeks prior. "Went missing a while back. They finally found him the other day, screaming his son's name at the top of his lungs. Poor guy."
I thought of the man in the gurney, the paramedics' straining forearms, the word ‘san’ thrown against the tinted glass of Aoi's station wagon like a fist against a door. I said nothing about any of it. "Do you know what happened to him?"
"Couldn't tell you what happened. But something was happening, that much I noticed." Ueda tapped the logbook sitting on the desk between us, a thick, cloth-bound volume gone soft and grey at the corners from years of handling. "His work got sloppy before he vanished. Long rambling entries that didn't add up to anything, half of them about his boy. And his very last log wasn't even words by the end, just San, San, San, over and over, corner to corner, front and back of the page, until the character for it had worn down to nothing but the three strokes. Didn't even sign off."
"I see," I managed, because there wasn't much else to offer.
"Ah, but don't let it rattle you." He clapped me on the shoulder, a touch too hard, a touch too cheerful. "Guy was always a bit off, ever since his boy passed, and he wasn't young anymore either. Not much can happen to a man in one summer." He said it with the easy confidence of somebody who had never once considered he might be wrong, and I decided, for both our sakes, not to disabuse him of it.
"You don't say," I said instead.
"Ha! Anyway, enough about that old buzzard. Let me put you onto something useful." He led me toward the break room and gestured at the ancient vending machine like a tour guide presenting the main attraction. "Hold down the lemonade button, the soda pop button, and the green tea button, all three at once, and you'll get all of it, sometimes with a bonus bottle of water rolling out. Best-kept secret in the building."
"Thank you for your guidance," I said, and meant it more than I expected to. There's something to be said for free lemonade at four in the morning.
"Of course! Speaking of guidance..." He ducked into the control room and came back with a slim notebook, its cover gone soft and grey with handling, held together at the spine with a strip of yellowed packing tape. "This gets passed down. Night engineer to night engineer, going back to when the place opened." He set it into my palms like something slightly too heavy for its size. "Fair warning, some of what's in there is Akamatsu's handwriting. I wouldn't put much stock in anything the man wrote toward the end of his tenure here, assuming you can even read it."
"I'll keep that in mind," I said.
Sure enough, there it was on my desk that night, exactly where he'd said it would be, sitting beside the logbook like a smaller, stranger sibling.
It hadn't been written by a single hand. I could tell that much from the first page alone: entries in blue ballpoint gave way to entries in pencil, gave way to a cramped, forward-leaning script I would later learn belonged to a woman named Furukawa who'd worked the shift the year before I arrived, gave way to something looser and more recent that could only have been Akamatsu's. Some of the rules were pure practicality, the kind of thing any competent night engineer would work out alone inside a week regardless: Don't leave food out uncovered. Keep the logbook closed except when you're actually writing in it. Listen a full thirty seconds before touching anything on the equipment rack, because a fault that announces itself by sound is usually a fault you can still fix before it becomes an emergency, and if something sounds different from how it sounded the night before, write it down, even if nothing else about it seems wrong.
Other entries were, by anyone's honest accounting, closer to superstition than procedure. When feeding a sheet through the dot matrix printer, pat it twice on the housing first, gently, the way you'd calm a jittery Ponyta ahead of a thunderstorm, and say aloud what you're printing and why it matters, or the thing would jam out of what could only be described as spite. Turn off any personal radio receivers between three and four in the morning, no exceptions, no explanation offered beyond a single underlined just do it in handwriting I didn't recognize. Someone, Ueda by the look of the cheerful, looping script, had scrawled the vending machine trick into the margin as though worried it might otherwise be lost to history.
And then, on a page of its own near the back, set apart from everything else by a thick pencil border that had clearly been traced over more than once by more than one hand, sat the last rule.
Do not go to the basement. There is absolutely nothing down there that requires your attention. If you hear noises coming from behind the door to the stairwell, turn away immediately. Report it to the daytime engineer after your shift. Do not record it in the logbook.
No explanation offered this time, only the instruction itself, repeated in at least two hands I could distinguish and probably a third I couldn't, as though every engineer who'd ever read that page had felt some private need to trace back over the warning rather than simply trust that the person before them had meant it.
My first night passed without incident. Even so, as I completed my handover with Mr. Ueda come morning, something tugged at the back of my mind, some small and persistent wrongness I couldn't yet put a name to. It wasn't until I'd walked out from under the shadow of the radio tower, biked back to Aunt Aoi's place, and crashed onto the futon that I managed to shake it loose enough to sleep.
Around 2:30AM on my third night at the Kanto Radio Station I was finally able to put my finger on what bothered me; the newness.
The Radio Station was new. New, like Lavender Town’s Magnet Train station. A sterile newness that felt uncannily vacant. The stillness made the air feel heavy and stagnant, even as the HVAC droned on with an omnipresent hum. Every step I made reverberated through the building as though magnified by the emptiness— as if, if it sounded louder, something would have to show itself to hear it. Even my heartbeat sounded louder, despite ostensibly being muffled by layers of flesh and bone and cloth.
I was no stranger to the quiet, or the stillness, at least, in theory. During my college days, I’d spent many a night alone in the library at irresponsibly late hours, my nose buried in some textbook or paper. But then, I was never in the library— not really. During those long nights, I’d be completely ensconced in my work, surrounded by the whirring gears of my own mind. My attention was not on every shadow that might've been in the corner of my vision or every sound that could’ve snagged my imagination. For better or for worse, I was completely insulated from my environment due to my need to be focused on anything but.
Not so here. Here, my preoccupation was my surroundings. As the nighttime engineer, it was my responsibility to remain alert and primed for anything that might signal a technical failure. And so, the solitude, the emptiness, the newness— it all rasped against my composure like a steel file against wood. For instance, the Pikachu.
I heard it before I found it: a faint, rhythmic scraping coming from behind the equipment rack in the transmission hall, too regular to be a loose panel and too soft to be a fan bearing. I crouched down with a flashlight, half expecting a rat, and found a Pikachu instead, sitting placidly in the gap behind the rack with a chewed length of signal cable held in both paws like a stick of pocky. It looked up at me, cheeks sparking, entirely unbothered at being caught red-pawed.
"You're going to electrocute yourself," I told it, which felt like a strange thing to say to a Pokémon whose whole diet, as far as I understood it, was electricity. It just kept gnawing. Free electricity, and here I was lecturing it on safety.
I didn't have the heart to spray it. I nudged a spare length of rubber-sheathed cable toward it instead, something it could chew without shorting anything that mattered, and left a rice cracker on top for good measure. It took the trade without complaint. By the time I checked the following night, the original cable had been abandoned in favor of the decoy, now shredded down to bare copper, and the Pikachu itself was gone, off to wherever Pikachu go during the day. I patched the damaged line, logged it as rodent and small Pokémon interference, chewed insulation, PA feed unaffected, and thought no more of it.
This was the rhythm of the job, I was coming to understand: nine parts routine to one part small mystery, and the mysteries always resolved themselves into something explicable if you were patient and thorough enough. A relay that stuck was a relay that needed cleaning. A humming line was a ground loop. I kept my flashlight, my repel spray, and my patience, and between the three of them I managed.
The break room vending machine deserved its own line in the logbook, if such things were permitted. It was an ancient model, older by the look of it than the building around it, salvaged perhaps from whatever had stood on this ground before, its finish gone the color of weak tea and its motor rattling like it housed a small, dying Pokémon of its own. On the drinks side it offered Green Tea, Lemonade, a soda pop of no describable flavor, and an energy drink whose can promised focus and delivered mostly a headache; on the snack side, wedged between packets of dried Pecha berries gone hard as gravel, sat a lone column of RageCandyBar, and, if you were desperate enough by four in the morning, Lava Cookies wrapped in plastic gone soft with age. Mr. Ueda's trick worked exactly as promised: hold down the buttons for the lemonade and the green tea at once, and the machine shuddered, considered its options, and spat out both, occasionally with a bonus can of water rolling out after as if in apology. I drank more lukewarm green tea in that first week than I had in the previous year.
Between the feeders and the logbook and the small parade of minor faults, the nights passed. I brought a paperback radio drama script I'd meant to read since college and never had, and on the slowest stretches, somewhere around one or two in the morning, I'd listen to whatever local broadcast bled faintly through the monitoring receiver: call-in programs for insomniacs, a weather report recycled on a two-hour loop, once a static-choked recording of enka music that seemed to come from nowhere in particular and stopped as abruptly as it started. I told myself it was just a distant station catching a lucky skip off the atmosphere. The manual I'd been given on my first day had a whole chapter on propagation and I found myself rereading it more than once, less because I doubted my explanations than because I liked having them ready.
Reputation, I was starting to think, really did precede its source and prime the listener for disappointment. Whatever Lavender Town had once been, the tower I worked in was, by any measure I could take with my own two hands and a decent flashlight, just a building. A new one, drafty in the wrong places and too quiet in the right ones, but a building all the same.
It was while I was sitting with that thought, turning the word newness over the way you'd worry at a loose tooth, that I found myself reaching for the tuning dial on the monitoring receiver almost without deciding to.
Nothing compelled me, and everything that came after hinges on that. No cold hand guided mine, no voice whispered a frequency in my ear. I was bored, and a little unsettled, and the manual on the shelf behind me had a whole section on the allocated bands with a note in faded pencil, not mine, in the margin beside the lowest listed frequency. Don't bother. Nothing down here. Somebody, sometime, had already tried. That was reason enough, or excuse enough, for me to want to try it myself.
I turned the dial past the marked band entirely, down into the register where the manual insisted there was nothing to hear but hiss.
At 3:33 in the morning, on a frequency the dial read out as 3.3333 kilohertz, a number too neat and too strange to be an accident of tuning, the static thinned, and voices came through with a clarity that had no business surviving that far below any allocated band.
There were several of them, overlapping, none addressed to me. A woman asking after someone named Fumiko, whether the persimmons had come in yet. A child's voice, or something that sounded like one, counting to ten and starting over each time it lost its place. And underneath all of it, closer than the rest, a man's voice, unhurried, a little wry, saying something about a koi pond needing to be drained before the frost.
I sat very still with my hand on the dial, not daring to touch anything else, and listened until the voice said something that made the back of my neck go cold.
"...that pond's going to freeze solid and crack the liner again if she doesn't get it drained before the frost sets in. Told her as much a hundred times, back when I could still get a word in edgewise."
I knew that voice. I'd only met the man twice in my life, once as a small child too young to remember his face and once more on the night I first arrived, in passing, in a photograph on Aunt Aoi's household altar that I'd assumed, the way you assume things about the recently dead, belonged entirely to grief and not at all to the present tense. Even so, I knew that voice.
Ryutaro.