Hello and welcome!

I haven't been as devout of a pokemon fan in the last few years, but I've always adored the Sinnoh and Unova regions. Sinnoh's my biased favorite, but I love N dearly. I thought it'd be a fun homage to write both into a story~

Plus, I haven't been feeling these games since the inauguration of gen 6, and I just want this. I just want this to happen man.

There are 4 different Ocs (and N because I love him) in this story who show up in different arcs, but it all comes together in the end (well, to the best of my ability). There will unfortunately be 0 Ash Ketchums, however.

Please enjoy!

ARC I: My Uninvolvement

In which a girl who is entirely uninvolved with the pivotal climax of the enemy gets herself into a rather tricky situation.

Chapter 1: The Prowess of Niri (And Layke Too)

My best friend's arm drapes across my back and settles at my waist in that vaguely couple-y way that confuses everyone around us, including ourselves.

We've kicked off our shoes and sunken into each other's shoulders, the sagging likes of a sand castle. Granules stick to my toes, and if I really wasn't feeling it, I could sift through the sea's waves and rinse myself of them... but I'm so lazy. How much effort would it take to get up? More than I'm willing to exude today.

So I lean against Layke, and I watch my piplup dart through the waters.

"Hey. Niri." Layke shifts against me, murmuring my name, NEE-ree. His telltale grin, sharp and pointy, a little stabby looking, has hooked my interest. His brown skin's flushed with an excitement, and his crop of bright blue hair almost but not quite stands on end. "What's Lup thinking right now?"

"I don't freakin know," I mutter. "He's too far away. Probably still mad at me for not getting up. Why?"

Layke hums to himself, bumbling his shoulder into mine. "I'unno. Just... wondering. Hey, if you can hear his thoughts, why don't you use it, like, all the time? That's so unfair. I wanna hear my pokemon's thoughts, maaan..."

"Layke, don't moan so loudly! Sandgem town is so tiny I bet everyone can hear you." I push him, and he flops into the beach sands. "Golly geez, dude."

"Well, why don'chu use your superpowers for good?" He looks up and asks with the corner of his lip crusted in sand, like a tan mustache. Yuck.

I scowl at him, tossing my waist-length indigo hair. "Lup only has mean thoughts. It's not really a superpower at all. And I only hear water types! Between the both of us, Lup is our sole user." I snort and almost add you know how useless that is. Fish. I can speak to fish. Oh my gosh, freaking magikarps.

Soon enough, the universe will deem me the literal fish-whisperer, and it's going to be horrible. And it'll all be Layke's fault because he has no default when it comes to sound. Sure, it's because his dad and little brother are deaf, so I should be a little more forgiving, but come on, man. Pull yourself together.

Giggling softly, Layke fingers with a strand of my hair, dividing it into three sections, steadily braiding. His eyes follow his fumbling movements, all jolly and bouncy, and his tongue crests the corner of his mouth. "I know: You just gotta become a water type gym leader. Then? People like me can beat you to a pulp and win free badges." He's so peaceful I have to boop his nose to get him to face me.

"You and your baby turtwig."

A smirk glistens across his face. "One day Turt will be huge, and you'll regret calling him anything but the best."

I break into a laugh and flop down next to him. "Imagine if you accidentally send out your geodude again, and instead of victory you face sheer humiliation!"

"Okay Niri that was one time!" he shouts, but he can't stop himself from tying off the braid in my hair. I have to admit he is weirdly skilled at his art, I guess because he's had so much practice on me.

"Geodudette will never geoforget, you loser," I remind him, so he turns around and scowls at the sea.

From behind his back he grumbles, "I bet you can only hear water pokemon because you wear a swimsuit instead of undies. You're like, like, married to it."

"Nasty." I swipe at him, and he tumbles over, wastrel scum. Finally standing, I place my feet beside his head. His cerulean hair is littered with sand. "It's because I'm special of course." I sense my old friend shifting around my toes, but I don't bother moving.

"You just said you're not, though, that your powers're freakin useless, you..." Layke spits granules and sputters around in his throat. "You don't make no sense, Niri... unnghh..." But he's too lazy, and he won't get back up. I'd call him a loser again if I didn't relate so hard.

Then there's footsteps and we both go silent fast. Layke, brushing himself off, scrambles to his feet. His ripe violet tee shirt sags around his thin, tall body. While he's distracted, I stick a finger into one of the holes in his jeans and he swats me away, stifling his giggles at the touch with a stone-like scowl.

At the edge of the beach where sand mixes with shrubbery, a young woman gazes upon us. She's stopped entirely, her eyes wide and round, and I can't figure out what she's thinking, just this blank aura of... nothing, like a concrete wall. Her skin is brown and her hair white, and it cuts down her back, curling around her head at a diagonal. I'd say it's the most unusual hair I've ever seen, except my designer magazines of Unovan beauty rob me of my right to judge.

Lup follows my confusion to my feet, where he chirps, hugging my leg with his wholly wet flippers. Let's kill the girl.

I frown down upon him, acting in that way I do around strangers that my piplup is annoying and wet and not at all thinking ugly thoughts in my head. What would we gain out of that.

I don't know. I just don't like the way she's looking at you.

Snorting, I shake my head. Well thank you for caring. Then I gently peel him off of my leg and mutter "you silly wet piplup now you're getting me all wet, how could you" like that's what this was about all along.

Lup, his lovable self, asks, Why did you say that.

The girl is still silent. I share a look with Layke, and he elbows me to go ahead. Of course, me. He can't talk to strangers.

Making my way through the sand dunes, I stand myself in front of the girl. "Uhhh, who are you? Whatcha starin' at us for?" Lup's tiny little webbed feet follow after me, and he grabs at my leg again.

Finally, she starts. "Oh! Ahh—" a flush breaks out over her cheeks, her gaze catching my swimsuit like a freaking feet catches and trips over stone, and an angry scowl wreaks havoc along her lips. "Noth-Nothing..." She folds her arms over her chest, and I catch a weird little tattoo on her tan arm. What is that, a G?

While she's busy being flustered and weird, I lift up my yellow rain slicker from the sands, shake it out half-pathetically, then slide it back on. She is still staring by the time I've covered myself.

"Nothing?" I ask, and she starts again.

"Well—You see, I..!" But she loses it once more. At this point I am tired of her attitude and tempted to let my piplup dance around her feet like a little pecking lunatic.

Then the girl lifts her weird diagonal hair from her shoulders and shouts, "I'm going to beat you up and steal your pokemon!" Out of her sudden tossed pokeball arises a tiny fire chimp—chimchar.

Lup, without a word on my end, sinks the chimchar into the sand with a wad of bubbles.

"Oh, uh..." She watches as her chimchar flops upon the ground, thoroughly not amped with this piplup-flavored ambush. "Hey that's... rrrrh, that's not fair... I have so many better pokemon back at the base..."

Over her mutters, I state, "Well, you didn't bring your better pokemon, did you?"

"N-No..." Frowning at me, continuing to mutter under her breath, the girl returns the chimchar to her pokeball, all the while glaring and frowning. "I didn't mean for this to... Oh, you stupid cute girl!"

I am suddenly aware of my existence. My eyes dip to my hands, then to her. "Uh, what?"

The twitchy young girl sputters all over again. "Never... mind!" Then she manages a few tentative steps away from us and cries over her shoulder, "TEAM GALACTIC WINS THIS STOLEN POKEMON!"

Layke finally has something to say, now that she's no longer in our faces. "Oh hey, that must've been Rowan's other... starter..."

I open and shut my mouth, then growl. "She can't just take that..! She clearly stole it. She said so."

Watching us run her way, twitchy girl shrieks and darts into the trees. "Ah, great, now we've lost her..." I mutter, but Lup leaps past me and into the freaking forest. If you get lost, you goobery little piplup...

But Lup is determined, and he will not even stop to wait for me, so I let him go. Layke follows with his overly-expressive brows, and his fingers fumble for the pokeballs strapped about his belt, but he lets his hands drop before he's even put much effort into it. "Dude, I'd help, but all of my pokemon are way slow." And I mean, I can't argue with that. Geodudette and Turt, a rock and a turtle, versus my loser bird.

I lean against my old friend. "What do you think we should do to pass the time?"

"We could train," he sort of offers, "like last time... when you used my geodude because you don't..."

Closing my eyes, I shake my head. "That was not very fun."

"Y-Yeah I... figured." Layke grunts. "When do you plan to, like, get more pokemon? I mean, other than Lup."

"I dunno... I won't be able to talk to them unless they're some sort of fish, so that would be less fun."

"Aw maaaan, I'm Niri and I hate being normal like every other trainer and having to not talk to my pookermoonz!"

I roll my eyes, elbowing him. "Hey, you wear a swimsuit every day of your life and maybe you'll gain some of my powers. I warn you, though, Lup is a dirty thing."

Layke starts walking ahead without even saying it, so I blindly stumble after him. While the sun begins to slow and stall behind us, I watch our footprints from the sand fade away. He's so—gangly and thin. And, well, I'm the total opposite. A full figure, as Layke would say, or whoever says it, I don't actually know.

As if he hasn't just walked away from the conversation, Layke muses, "I'd rather live like a scavenger in the woods, like with the grass skirt and everything, until I can talk to Turt. I feel like Turt has some very wonderful things to say about all kinds of people and all kinds of things. He is probably the smartest out of Lup and Geodudette combined."

"You know, from what Lup has transcribed to me, you might be right. Or not. I have no idea."

We head north, reaching the homely little pokemon center of Sandgem. Its telltale vermilion roof has been bleached by sunshine over the years, and the tile floors are crusted over and polished in sand, from no-good losers like me who do not shake the granules from between our toes.

I recognize and bypass the fact that I've once again forgotten my shoes by the beach. It comes at a loss to me as to when Layke re-donned his tennis shoes, but once again I am the silly barefooted one. The tiles are cold, and I am marginally embarrassed.

"We could just play checkers until—"

"Yeah." I snort. "Let's play checkers, Layke."

Wedged in the corner of the center's meager bookshelf, there is a patchy box of checkers. It is missing one piece because Layke got so mad when we were kids that he took my king and hid it in the dirt, and to this day we have no idea where the hole is. The pieces not hidden in the dirt have adorable symbols on them: one is standard red poke balls; the other sports some standard blue poke balls. They would be great balls, except nobody put the weird red accents on them. On the other side of the discs, hand-painted pokemon live behind or I guess "in" the ball: there's the three starters, of course; chunky brown bidoof, a smiley ditto, bright green budew, and all sorts of other mons are featured.

It's cute until you're playing with children and they don't want the red side, they want to replace every red pokemon with the blue pokemon that they like more, and before you know it, you're playing a different game entirely: a game that always ends with someone crying.

Layke and I settle at our same table, and Nurse Morrow is watching us through her periphery; she was a Nurse Joy, as in formerly, until her super existential phase. Now her apron has been dyed a nasty black and her hair lies tattered and red about her face. She is the most intimidating person I have ever met and the sole reason I scavenge for berries instead of healing Lup in the center. Maybe that was her goal all along, to incite a revolution of fear.

"Hey. Niri. Stop lookin' at Morrow."

"Whubh—" I flush and meet his gaze.

Giggling, he adds, purposely pitching his voice low, "We all know you have a crush on her~"

I stand up so hard my chair falls over my feet. "YOU! I! NOOOOOOO NO NO NO! I DON'T KNOW HOW YOU CAME UP WITH THAT IDEA, BUT TRULY YOU ARE THE GREATEST OF FAILURES IF THAT IS WHAT YOU THINK OF ME AFTER THIS MANY YEARS."

Once I've pulled my chair up, I make my way back into it; but it is only once I've settled that Nurse Morrow slams an old textbook from nurse college onto the booth in front of her. "Do not speak so loudly in my center," she utters in her almost-guttural tone.

I wonder if she's regretting her decision. So many years of nurse college to become inducted as a Joy, and then you live off of taxpayers' money for the rest of forever. In a place like Sandgem town, maybe I'd go crazy too.

I shouldn't be asking myself these questions about our hardly-sense-making economy, or I'll end up like her.

My best friend finishes fumbling with the pieces; he's already placed the blue ones in front of me, what a gentleman. Wordlessly he points at the spot where my last ball should be, but is living in the dirt like a seed for the rest of eternity, and we agree silently that I have a disc there. It's more fun to use the invisible one, actually, because Layke forgets where it is, so I was only bitter until I beat him with invisible poke ball powers and he recognized the simple truth that taking another away would merely increase my prowess.

We get pretty far through our match, and I get my invisible disc kinged before the center's doors slide open and a certain angry piplup marches over to us. He climbs up my leg, flops onto the table, and scatters our pieces around our feet like confetti.

I narrow my eyes. What. This would be much more annoying if I'd had a good run, but unfortunately for me, Layke remembered the disc's location, and I am a horrible player without that handicap.

He huffs. I did not catch the girl. I got pretty close until I had the opportunity to trip over a rock that I just couldn't miss. His bruised foot lags behind him, and I only now notice the careful not-quite-wince that fits his bill like a limp bandage. She wins... but only for now. I still say we should've killed her.

Well, she thought I was cute, so I can't say I'm with you.

That is because you are silly and dumb.

Thanks, Lup. I plop him forcefully onto my lap, then fish a plump blue oran berry out of my pocket and pop it into his mouth. He curls up into a sigh and leaves himself be.

I glance over at Layke, sweet Layke, who has already cleaned up the pieces and reset them. "Hey, dude, Lup's back."

He stares upon my piplup like he didn't watch the thing dance our discs off the board. "Oh. Right."

His hand raises to one of the discs, and it hovers, listless.

There's this look in his gaze, his deep blue borderline-violet gaze, when there's something his heart desires. Small and shimmery and hopeful without daring to hope, knowing that it won't happen but yet still asking, still shamelessly asking with the willfulness of a child.

Slowly, mouth agape, I add, "You know, one more game wouldn't hurt." My hand fidgets and twists around the braid, his braid.

And his eyes break like clouds, and they brighten, soften. And he doesn't say a word, but he zones into the game, his eyes keeping careful track of my invisible disc which still has not moved yet.

And that's how I wonder in the pit of my heart if something will ever happen between us.
Because sometimes he looks at me like that, and it makes it hard to breathe.
And I wonder, and I wonder, but I just don't know yet.

I really shouldn't be thinking this way. We still haven't found the way to Oreburgh city. Someone told us there's a path from Jubilife, but Layke is deathly terrified of strangers, and Jubilife is, like, every stranger in the universe except in one town. We've been trying to scale the craggy hills and forests that supposedly make a faster route to the first gym, but as of yet we are failures.

And as of yet I'm gonna have to stop thinking the way I'm thinking. There are plenty of cute people—in my age range unlike that girl—and there is no reason to tie myself down to this tone-deaf loser boy.

Then there's that light in his eyes, and it's hard to look away—and it's sort of breathtaking.

And Lup tells me I'm losing the game, I've lost the game, but it occurs to me that for once I don't mind. Maybe next time, I'll even let Layke use the blue pieces.