Chapter 2: Shadows in the Night
Dear Diary,
I arrived home less than a week ago, and I'm already becoming a local celebrity. It's a bit nerve wrecking, but I'm becoming more and more used to it. It still feels weird to have local kids run up to me and ask for my autograph though. I've known these kids my entire life, and they now think I'm some kind of Pokémon catching god. And it's not just to my hometown either, but the entire region too. Photographers and journalists catch me at every step outside of my house. I'll be shopping with my mom and then, all of a sudden, I'll hear a reporter start up their speech behind me, then go through their laundry list of questions that I have to refuse. It's weird to say the least, and I almost wish that the fame would stop sometimes."The Most Successful Teenager in the Region" was a popular headline to describe my achievements. It gives a certain pressure that I have to live up to now. Especially since the biggest news stations have scheduled an interview with me and Professor Oak. They're dying to hear something from the girl who captured every Pokémon in Kanto. I'm not exactly sure how I feel about that yet, I've never been on live TV before, much less been the center of it!
Most importantly though, I showed Professor Oak the Dex. He was overjoyed when he heard I had completed it, and that I had managed to catch Mewtwo as well. He asked me to come into his lab the day after I had returned—he respected that I would want the day to rest. The next day, I pored over every detail of my adventures and every Pokémon species that I had seen as he furiously worked on my Pokédex. It was fun as I reminded myself of everything I had seen. It was an amazing journey that I wish I could live all over again. Before I left, the professor asked that I leave Mewtwo there so that he could hopefully find a way to make it less aggressive. He nicknamed his program "Pokémon Anger Management." I couldn't help but laugh at the idea, but he insisted it worked. He told me that all starter Pokémon go through it. Wild Pokémon can be dangerous, and they have to get used to people before being handed off to children. I agreed reluctantly, even after hearing that it wouldn't do anything bad to Mewtwo; the last thing that creature probably wanted to see was the inside of another lab. Oak told me not to worry and promised me I could take Mewtwo home after the interview next week. In the meantime, he let me keep my Pokédex after uploading its data to his computer. That way I still had my trophy, and he had all the information he could ever want about the first one hundred and fifty Pokémon . Life is great right now, and I couldn't ask for anything more.
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I awoke with a start to the beeping noise of my alarm clock. I closed my eyes for a moment, begging to no one in particular for only a few more moments of rest. But alas, the noise did not yield to my silent pleas. Groaning, I tossed my sheets off, shivering at the sudden rush of cold air that hit me. My pajamas did little to shield me from the sudden chill of the late autumn morning.
My fist came down on my alarm clock the same way it did every morning. I was bound to hit the off button with the amount of area my fist covered, and it helped get out my pent-up rage at the horrid device. It was a win-win scenario. Or, it usually was; this morning was not as lucky. The alarm now beeped with two different sounds that seemed to amplify each other. This was not a great start to my morning.
"Oh, come on! This isn't fair," I groaned as I turned my lamp on to deal with my faulty clock. I grabbed the device from my night stand and clicked the button on top. The noise ceased, but I couldn't help but notice something off about the display.
It currently read 2:41 AM. Odd, I thought. I checked what time the alarm was set for, so that I would wake up when I needed to in order to get ready for my interview. Sure enough, it wasn't supposed to go off until 6:30 AM. To make the situation even more odd, there was still an alarm going off somewhere in my room.
I searched the clock, flipping it multiple different ways to see where the noise was coming from. It wasn't coming from my clock at all, nor from my cellphone—I had already looked at that. There were no active alarms, and no one was trying to text or call me. The only notifications were from Tweetster, and those were muted due to the massive influx of new followers and messages. I looked around my room slowly searching for the continuing source of the noise.
The realization hit me suddenly when I noticed a light blinking on the other side of my room. The sound wasn't that of an alarm, it was the sound my Pokédex made whenever it sensed an unknown Pokémon. I looked to my dresser where I had set the machine, and sure enough, the registration light was blinking with a new notification.
"What the hell?" I said as I sprang up to my feet next to my bed. I strode over to where the Pokédex was sitting and picked it up. I half expected the light to go off when I touched it, like it was a technical error or something due to Oak tampering with it recently. But no, the light continued to flash, urging me to check what it had just seen. Usually it only beeped and flashed twice when it detected a new Pokémon; the computer continued to make noise despite already having gone off for more than a few minutes now. Panic began to take hold in me as I started to wake up more and I became aware of what the situation meant.
Before I opened the face of the Pokédex, I tip toed over to my window to check if it was closed. The Pokédex only registered Pokémon that were within a certain radius, and that radius only extended for line of sight. Meaning that the Pokémon was in my room. The situation became more disturbing when I confirmed that the window was closed and locked with plenty of undisturbed dust sitting on its sill. I looked outside suspiciously from left to right, then did a double check in each direction again before closing my blinds. I whipped around to face my dresser and the still beeping Pokédex.
As a precaution, I grabbed Charizard's ball from my desk. The fire type would barely fit in my room with his size, but something had to protect me from whatever was intruding if a fight arose. Plus, I felt safer while holding his ball, like nothing could hurt me. I continued to search every nook and cranny. The search through my closet, under my bed, and even tearing up all of my drawers brought me no results. My heart fluttered faster and faster with each empty result as I realized that this thing had the jump on me. Whatever was in my room had been there for hopefully only a moment, and it had come and gone undetected except by the Pokédex. This creature was unnatural to say the least.
Having turned up nothing, I set Charizard's ball next to me as I settled down on the foot of my bed with the Pokédex. I took a few deep breaths, trying to return my heart rate back to normal after such a strange occurrence. I flipped the lid open to see what creature it had just discovered. Thankfully, the beeping stopped when I turned the machine's screen on. That, however, did raise even more alarms in my head, and my only recently calmed heart fluttered rapidly again. Everything about what was happening now was wrong. A malfunction would have required me to do some technical work or, at the very least, turned the machine completely off and back on. More questions than answers came up once I looked at the screen.
A new shadow was on the display—an unregistered Pokémon like I had seen so many times before. "But I caught them all, how is there another one?" I wondered out loud. I closed the face, then opened it again, half expecting the new entry to go away. When I looked at the screen again, I was stunned to still see the Pokémon still there. The anonymous form reminded me of smaller, less violent looking Mewtwo.
My mind began to race with too many questions and not enough possible answers. How? Why? Where? were the words that summed up my plethora of thoughts perfectly. But, the most important question to me at the moment: what? What was this new creature, this new one hundred and fifty-first Pokémon?
It was a phantom that I believed only existed due to my sleep deprived state, like some kind of nightmare. Something deep down inside of me, however, knew that this new Pokémon was real. Everything that had just occurred was very much real despite what I wanted to believe. This wasn't a dream like I so desperately craved it to be. I hadn't actually caught them all, and now I had to go face the press later that morning and claim that I really had. As I settled back into bed, I knew one thing was for certain about this whole ordeal.
I was a fraud.
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