02 / 23 / 11

Greetings!

I know I have another Pokemon story, Pretty Kitty, but I'm starting a new one anyways. I've decided to keep three chapters ahead when I'm posting, so I'll always have something to update, even when the river of inspiration runs dry. So here's hoping I write fast, if this story takes off.

Reviews are love, but I'm getting over the write-for-reviews thing, so if you enjoy this story, thumbs up. I'd love to hear from you! :)

I hope you guys find these characters and their stories as endearing as I do. :)

Disclaimer: I am glad I don't own Pokemon. Way too much effort. Serious props to Satoshi Tajiri, though.

AMAZING GRACE

~ Prologue ~

On Celebrity Parenthood and Elementary Misfits

Every story has a beginning.

Most stories have good beginnings; ones that start with things like 'Once upon a time…' or 'There was once a happy little girl, who…', and usually finish with cheesy clichés like 'And they all lived happily ever after.'

This story isn't one of those stories.

For starters, there is no 'Once upon a time', because for there to be such a beginning would mean the characters have probably had time to take a leisurely look over their completed story with fond nostalgia, acknowledging that it is now over, but an appropriate time to start re-telling it.

For me, the story hasn't ended yet. It's still going.

But you've gotta start somewhere, right? So I'm telling mine from where I suspect it began. It's a pretty ambiguous start; cleverly disguised by the heinously evil yet indisputably genius plot of a largely underestimated adversary.

But let me fill in a few blanks first.

I grew up in the swanky-hotel-room, backstage life of a child born into fame. The fame wasn't mine, by the way. It was my father's; TV personality Vance Lincoln Buckthorn, once-coveted reporter turned Goldenrod Morning Herald anchorman, with a hundred-watt beam that blinded with its dazzling whiteness, and a bass voice as smooth as melted dark chocolate.

Charisma personified, quote unquote.

He was good, old, adorable 'daddy' to me until about the age of nine, when I realised that unless I learned how to steam vegetables and boil pasta, I was going to live off TV dinners and microwave popcorn for the rest of my life, and would hit morbid obesity by the age of twelve. It wasn't that my father couldn't cook (though I honestly think he can't), but that he was simply never home at night to do it.

And my mother, you might be wondering? She was out of the picture before my second birthday. I knew very little about her as I was growing up, just that she was a woman whose dreams couldn't wait, and whose drive for achieving was greater than her maternal instincts. When I was old enough to understand what all this meant, I decided the part of her that was meant to be all motherly and parental must have malfunctioned during childbirth.

The point is, I never heard a peep from my mom as a kid, and by my tenth birthday I was a spaghetti Bolognese prodigy.

Around the same time, I began to develop a solid interest in Pokémon. Kids in my class started bringing the little monsters to school in red and white Pokéballs and showing them off at recess. I couldn't relate to them, as my home environment was one that came with a strictly-no-Pokémon policy. My dad was not a 'Pokémon person', and never would be. He didn't own one himself, which didn't take me long to conclude was a good thing, since he didn't even have the time to properly raise a child. I'd hate to think what would have happened to the poor thing; I doubt Dad would have adhered to the basic laws of Pokémon rights.

But I didn't think like that at ten years of age. All I knew was that I wanted something cute and cuddly to play with at school, like everyone else. Instead of the ever-popular Snubbull I'd been so hoping for, my father gave me a purple gel watch and a framed photograph of himself shaking hands with the at-the-time Johto League Champion, who I'd never even heard of.

I was intensely disappointed.

By my eleventh birthday, the League Champion had been replaced twice, and my taste in Pokémon had changed from pink, huggable and domesticated to the now insanely cool Water-type with the fad sweeping Goldenrod Elementary.

I had my heart set on getting myself a Marill, which, back then, was the most ultimately awesomely fantastic-est, super-cool Pokémon ever. I loved its gigantor mouse ears and its pretty bobble-tail. I wanted one so badly it would keep me up at night. Just thinking about it would make me all excited and giggly.

My dad forgot my birthday that year. Delivered a day late via express post from Mahogany Town, where he was reporting on a strange mass-outbreak of wild Azumarill (oh, the cruelty of irony), was a new journal and a gift voucher for two thousand Poké to the Goldenrod Department Store. I lamented that with that money I could purchase a heck of a lot of Items that would be useful to me if I was a Trainer, and put it aside until I'd saved enough allowance to afford a Marill Pokédoll.

Of course, by the time I finally got one, the most ultimately awesomely fantastic-est, super-cool Pokémon (ever) was Cyndaquil, and Fire was the new Water.

I tried. I really did.

I gave it one more shot when I turned twelve. Pokémon-type fads had become dorky, and it was the thing to be into Pokémon battles on TV. 'Cool' Pokémon weren't cute anymore. They were 'strong' or 'tough' or – the ultimate win for the boys – the kinds of Pokémon that made the girls in my class squeal in disgust. A lot of Caterpie and Spinarak appeared that year. I was one of the unlucky few of the girlish kind whose stomach churned violently whenever a Bug-type Pokémon was let out in the playground. They made my skin crawl. A couple of the particularly nastier boys discovered infinite amusement in making me cry at every opportunity.

I came to hate going to school.

By my thirteenth birthday, I was pretty over the whole thing. After three years of yearning, my enthusiasm was waning, and having never really had much to do with Pokémon, I was starting to thinking I wasn't really missing out on anything. It was a period of major denial, but it did make me feel a bit better about not fitting in at school. Thankfully, I'd graduated from Goldenrod Elementary, and would be starting afresh at the Goldenrod Preparatory, a fancy-schmancy all-girls middle school only for those rare few with a high enough IQ to meet the Preparatory's ridiculously prestigious standards.

Or, in my case, and like so many of my classmates', a pretty penny in their daddy's pocket.

It was just my luck that things got off to a bad start. For some reason, I just didn't click with the other girls. I found myself in the sad little cafeteria corner indistinctly labelled - but widely assumed by the popular majority - 'LOSER'. If anyone decided to seek me out (oh ho ho), they'd have most likely found me in the aisles of the library, doing my homework for lack of anything better to occupy my time.

By all means, I was no intellectual prodigy. Nor was I particularly athletically inclined (far from it). I guess I kind of just failed in all aspects of middle school.

Don't ask me how. It just happened.

The other girls all formed little cliques, and somehow I didn't slot in anywhere. It was like being the only kid left when choosing teams. Every single day. I managed to end up being the outcast – again – and there was no-one I could grovel at the feet of to change that fact.

Believe me, I tried.

But the beginning of my woeful thirteenth year was nothing in comparison to what the rest of it would bring. My birthday present that year was a doozy.

I would have taken a dozen tacky watches, twenty framed photos of my father's cheesy camera-smile, and a hundred utterly useless journals I would never write in, over Camilla Antonia Hemlock.

Hands down. Any day.

At first, I was actually pretty excited at the prospect of having someone new in the family. Oh, how innocent and naïve I was. I never questioned exactly why my father felt the need to re-marry, or why he did it on a whim, without my presence at the ceremony. By now his notorious womanising nature was no secret to me, nor was his equally notorious tendency to be horrendously impulsive. The evidence was far and plenty, from the red sports-car down in valet he'd arrived home with one day, to the wall-sized aquarium (eternally empty) in our lounge room. I maintain the conclusion that it must have simply been a career-advancing move.

Otherwise, the whole thing really doesn't make any sense. At all.

I was nervous about meeting Camilla, of course, but keen to have a real mother figure for the first time in my entire life. Someone who I might be able to relate to. Someone who could teach me things only a mother can; things like… how to speak to a boy, or how to convince your father that spending ten thousand Poké on a pair of pumps is a spectacular idea.

Those sorts of things.

As it turns out, there were a lot of things only Camilla Antonia Hemlock could teach me. For the lessons I learned, I am forever indebted to her. No kidding.

"Gracie," my dad said in his booming chocolate-voice. I will never forget that moment. Ever. It would be imprinted – branded – in fluorescent ink in the very front of my memory for the rest of my life. "I'd like you to meet your new step-mother." He turned then, having just come in through the front door of our penthouse apartment. "Camilla, sweetheart, this is my daughter, Grace Lorraine."

The woman who came through that door then was so far from what I imagined that the shy, excited smile dropped from my face so fast I almost heard it land somewhere close to my feet.

Camilla Antonia Hemlock is a perfect example of someone who is 'larger than life'. Literally. She made a little grunting noise of frustration as she squeezed through the door, her liberal body a little too generous for her garish buttercup-yellow pencil skirt-and-blazer ensemble. Her banana-blonde hair bobbed at her broad shoulders in fat curls, decorated with a stupid little fascinator-thing, perched on top of her head. She surveyed me with enormous jewel-blue eyes caked with makeup, and I stood, immobilised as if by a Glare attack, under her fiercely judgemental gaze.

And when her fat, pouty, glossy red lips twitched down disdainfully, I knew I was toast.

"Hello," she said, speaking very distinctly at me, not to me. She said nothing else to me. "Darling, won't you come in and see our lovely new home?"

It was then that I suddenly realised, with a violent kick in my stomach and a sharp prickle of shock down my spine, that Camilla Antonia Hemlock was a package deal that came with an added bonus. I remember so clearly the momentary impulse – strong, urgent – to flee wildly, but I swallowed it down, ignoring the alarm bells screaming manically in my brain.

In through the door stepped Zeke Hemlock, tall, lanky, and as shockingly dark as his mother was blonde. He raised brilliant blue eyes – the same striking shade of azure as Camilla's – beneath a shaggy jet-black fringe and gave me one analytical glance. I struggled not to cringe from the blow of two utterly terrible rejections in the space of about fifteen seconds when he looked away dismissively and said, flatly, "Where's my room?"

It was right about here that my story began.