Heart of a Pokemon (Patreon)

The Millennium Comet. It came every one thousand years, and inside of it, it carried a pokemon known as Jirachi. The legends call it the Wishmaker.

Aeyla looked up at the comet as it traced a path in the night sky. She was told it was tradition to make a wish. She didn’t expect anything from it, but Jirachi was a mythical, legendary kind of pokemon. Who knows, right?

She glanced around at the pokemon gathered before her. There was her torchic, her starter pokemon from Littleroot Town. There was her pikachu, who had also been there from pretty early on. And lastly was lotad, who was a relatively new addition to her troop.

“All right everyone, look up and make a wish, okay?” she says smiling, then closes her eyes and points her nose to the stars. “I wish that I could understand my pokemon better, so we can be even closer friends!”

Just then, a strange tingling came over her, and then vanished. She opened her eyes and looked herself over. Her pikachu glanced at her, having finished making his wish, and tilted his head with curiosity. “Pika?”

She waved it off. “Oh, nothing. Just felt a little weird for a second. Anyway, we should probably head to bed. How about a night under the comet?”

With a resounding cheer, she went about setting up her sleeping bag. Once she was settled in, her pokemon gathered around to snuggle in the night, and they all went to sleep.

~~~~

After a particularly restful night, Aeyla woke and sat up with a stretch and a yawn. Her pokemon did the same. “Well, let’s hit the road! We’ve got a gym to beat!”

Aeyla packed her supplies and returned her pokemon to their pokeballs and set out. On her way, she passed a few children running along with their pokemon partners in tow. In some respects, it was a little embarrassing for her. After all, she had just started her journey, but her parents had forced her to wait until she was an adult to leave for her trip. All her friends had already left years ago. She had some catching up to do! But that was okay too, she thought. All that matters is that she’s finally on her journey now!

With a satisfied huff in her walk from the thought, she resumed her trip. After a few minutes though, something felt wrong. She was growing strangely tired for having just woken up, and body began to feel hot. It wasn’t particularly warm outside, but she was quickly panting. She decided to walk into the woods a ways and take a moment to rest.

She placed a hand on her chest and tried to slow her increasing heartrate, but soon her fingers were going numb. Was she sick? What was going on?

She watched her hands as she lost all control over her fingers. First, her fingers darkened and wrists reddened, then her fingers began to swell unnaturally. “My hands!? What’s happening to me?” she cried.

Scariest of all, her fingers now began to merge together slowly. She flailed her arms and dropped her backpack onto the floor. All she could was watch as her hands morphed into strange hoof-like shapes and the red coloring crawled up her arms.

A piercing pain struck her forehead suddenly, and she cried out as two small point burst from her hairline. They grew longer and larger as she trembled, and soon other changes came over her.

Her thighs and upper arms began to swell, and her body as a whole began to put on weight. Her clothes stretched thin, and her blouse pulled upward over belly due to her slowly barreling torso. Her neck grew longer, and second by second, her head rose away from her shoulders.

Her arms didn’t even resemble arms anymore, just hooved legs, like her formerly only set of legs was also quickly becoming. Between her increased weight, lengthening torso and neck, and her weirdly shaped legs, she was forced onto all fours, which felt eerily natural. Through the pain of swelling and the shredding of her clothes, she managed to force her eyes open to see more clearly what was happening to her. She screamed again, though her voice was starting sound strange and course now.

Her body had become oddly segmented and a bright, crimson red. Her underside was a dark, leathery gray, and the bumps and curves of her formerly humanoid body was being slowly smoothened out into a simple, flowing body. Two tail-like protrusions were growing from her rear-end, and they seemed similar to the large, somewhat heavy horns that had sprouted from her head.

Her eyes watered with tears at the sight of her alien body, and she sobbed deeply as she waited for the changes to finally be over. She was entirely quadruped now, and she could feel the weight of her thick, shelled body on all four of her hoof-like feet.

“What… why… what am I? Why did this happen!?” she moaned softly, though it didn’t sound quite right to her. She glanced around, weirded out about by the larger range of movement her neck now had, and spotted a pond a short distance away. She took a single step and was immediately troubled by her new walking pattern.

“This… is going to be hard to get used to…” she muttered, having to plan out each leg movement. Eventually, she struggled her way over to the pond and saw a massive, bug-like creature staring back at her. She took a sharp breath. “That’s… me? B-but why this…? Of anything I could have been… but instead… I’m this?” She noted that her shell was particularly glittery though, which she thought was strange. She also retained her eye color, though her pupils encompass the entire eye now. As well, she still had her mane of red-brown hair, which she found strange, and almost troubling. How was she supposed to maintain it if she didn’t have hands?

Slowly, she walked away from the pond and back to her bag. “I need… I need my friends. Maybe… maybe they can help me…”

She was immediately confronted with a problem. Her bag was zipped up. She had no hands. “Arceus above, why……?” she moaned, nudging the bag with her face uselessly.

After resigning herself to the task, she struggled with the bag until she caught it on one of her horns and the other end under her foot. With a quick motion, she tore the bag easily, and the contents spilled onto the floor. Among a few empty pokeballs, the three specially marked ones containing her partners rolled slightly across the grass. She went to each in turn and nudged the button on the front of it. In a blast of white energy, Torchic, Pikachu, and Lotad appeared before her.

“Aeyla?” the pikachu yawned, not yet looking at anything in particular. Then he froze, seeing the strange behemoth before him. “What the- Hey! Where’s Aeyla?” he demanded with sparking cheeks.

Aeyla’s eyes grew wide. “Woah… you… since when can you talk?” she says with a gasp.

Torchic tilted her head. “What do you mean? All pokemon can talk to each other...”

“Unless…” Lotad started, looking deep in thought.

Pikachu, likewise, seemed thoughtful. Then, in a glance upward, he sees the bug’s hair and eyes and gasps. “Aeyla!? That’s… That’s you!? What happened to you!?”

“I don’t know! I started walking and then I felt sick and then I turned into this! I’m so scared – I don’t know what’s going on!” she cried, a tear running down her face.

“O-oh, it’s okay, Aeyla! Don’t cry, we’re here to help, right?” Torchic offered, to which Lotad nodded in agreement.

Meanwhile, Pikachu scurried over to the ripped contents of her bag and retrieve a flat, red device. Walking over with it, he flipped it open. “I bet this thing can tell you what you are now, right!”

“It’s a Pokedex, it should have data on every pokemon. I-if… If I’ve really turned into a pokemon, that’ll tell us which one, at least…” Aeyla surmised.

Pikachu nodded and then pointed it at Aeyla. The pokedex sprung to life and chimed in with a robotic voice, “Scolipede, the Megapede Pokemon.”

Aeyla shuffled over and glanced at the entry. “Aw man, these all look scary… I don’t want to be scary! If… If I was gonna be a pokemon, why couldn’t I be a cute one like you guys? Then we could all go on little adventures together!”

Torchic tilted her head. “Well… We’re not gonna be tiny forever. Eventually we’ll evolve and get bigger too. And anyway, we can still go on adventures! A-and look! Now we can talk to each other! Isn’t that cool?”

“I guess…” Aeyla admitted. She looked over to Pikachu and Lotad, who seemed to be discussing something over by her bag. “What’s going on?”

“Well, Lotad and I were talking and… you’re going to run into a problem if we get into a fight with any trainers. They’ll probably try to capture you, especially since I’ve never seen anything like you before. It’s likely that your kind of pokemon isn’t native to around here. And also, your coloring was marked with a star in that pokedex. Between that and the fact that you’re sparkling, like a lot, you’re likely even a rare version of that pokemon. People are going to want to capture you.”

“Oh no! I don’t want to be captured! I want to stay with you guys!” Aeyla says, horrified.

“Right. So we figured… Why not… capture yourself? Pikachu suggested.

“Capture… myself? What do you mean?”

“I mean, take one of these pokeballs, and put yourself inside. Then, once you’re registered, I’ll let you out, and then no one could capture you again, right?”

“Oh… I guess you’re right… but I’m scared! What if it hurts?” Aeyla says, worried.

“It doesn’t hurt. We do it all the time, right?” Torchic offered.

“Y-yeah… I guess… Okay… I just… have to get it over with then. Promise you’ll let me out?”

Pikachu nodded. “Promise.”

Aeyla nodded back and then walked slowly over to an empty pokeball. She shivered, took a deep breath, and then tapped the ball with her nose.

She felt weightless for a moment, then it was all black. Strangely, it wasn’t a scary black, it was a warm and comforting black. She felt… safe.

Moments later, the real world returned in a flash of white light and she stumbled to maintain her balance.

“How do you feel?” Torchic asks, concerned.

Aeyla shivered as her senses returned, but then she nodded. “Fine. It was… kinda nice, actually.

“Good. Well, we’ve gotten that taken care of. Where do we want to go now?” Lotad asks.

“I dunno,” Aeyla says. “We were gonna challenge the gym, but we can’t really do that now. Maybe… we just go sightseeing? Explore the world? That… that sounds like fun.”

“I like it!” Pikachu cheers. “Let’s get going!”

Aeyla nods. “Right.” She starts walking back toward the path, but then stops and looks behind her at her trainer supplies. She thinks for a moment, then shakes her head. She didn’t need it anymore.

~~~~

A while down the road, Pikachu speaks up. “Say, Aeyla, what did you wish for from Jirachi?”

“Oh, nothing, really. It’s actually kinda embarrassing, but…” her voice caught in her throat and then she started giggling.

“Wh-what? What’s so funny?” Torchic asks.

Aeyla shakes her head. She was still laughing, but it quickly turned into a mix of giggling fits and sobbing as tears began to run down her face again.

“Woah, what? What’s wrong?” Pikachu asks, worried.

“N-nothing, it’s just…” she started, regaining her composure somewhat. “It was me. I did this… I… I wished I could understand Pokemon better… So I could be better friends with you guys.”

Torchic tilted her head. “Really? Well… I think Jirachi might have granted your wish…”

Aeyla nods. “I… I think so too. In that case… I should be happy, I think. Happy to true, real friends with you all. This… this is going to be a lot of fun, right?”

“Aw, Aeyla! We’ll make sure we have the most fun that any group of pokemon ever had!” Torchic cheered.

~~~~~~

Can you tell I used to write fanfiction? That was... overly long. But I couldn't help it!