Day 26 of the journey to Kanto. Sunny.
Reiji woke up in his private room at the Pokémon Center, washed up, slung his pack over his shoulder, and got ready to head into the old-growth forest in the protected reserve.
The Safari Zone was nearby too. If he found the boy, he could swing by afterward and see whether he got lucky enough to spot a Dratini. That line led to Dragonite, a pseudo-legendary, so of course he was tempted. Catching one was another matter. Just being there would be worth it.
Before setting out, he stopped at a supermarket and bought another 300,000 Pokédollars' worth of survival supplies, enough to keep him going in the wild for two months.
He had skipped resupplying in Gringey City because the pollution there was so bad that he hadn't trusted the stores to sell anything decent. He had put it off until now.
Once he finished shopping, he opened the Indigo League guidebook map. It showed the rough boundaries of the preserve. He tapped the northern grasslands with one finger. If the informant had been right, the Kangaskhan herd should be there.
The map was sly about it too. It marked the protected area and slapped on warnings about dangerous wild Pokémon, but it never said what species lived there or what the terrain was actually like.
Reiji smiled at that, put the map away, released Poliwhirl, and entered the forest.
He chose not to fly in this time because that would have been asking to get noticed. Anyone cruising openly through the sky above a protected reserve might as well hang a sign around their neck that said poacher.
Besides, he had Darkrai's sensing ability. If rangers were nearby, he could avoid them in advance. If there was a powerful wild boss up ahead, he could steer around that too. There was no reason for them to blunder into anything.
Once inside the forest, he lost all sense of direction. Without landmarks, getting turned around was easy, so he sent Scyther up above the canopy to scout the route while he made for the northern grasslands.
He saw plenty of wild Pokémon along the way, including more than a few rare ones, but he didn't try to catch any of them. The boy came first. Pokémon could wait. He wasn't here as a hunter.
That march took the entire day. By the time he reached the northern grasslands of Safari Land, the sun was already sinking. There, bathed in the evening glow, was the Kangaskhan herd.
He raised his binoculars and searched the herd carefully, but he didn't spot any child among them. That meant he would need to study their habits first. A few days of observation would probably be enough to uncover where they were hiding the boy.
He didn't rush it. First he let his Pokémon out for dinner. Then he went back to watching the herd. Only after sunset did the Kangaskhan return to a patch of grass shielded by rock formations. That had to be where they slept at night.
One of them was much larger than the rest, a full head taller than the others. That was almost certainly the leader.
Once he tracked them that far, he finally found what he was looking for.
A little boy in a leopard-skin wrap was sitting on one of the rock piles.
That had to be the missing child from the notice.
When the lead Kangaskhan returned, the boy immediately climbed into its pouch. The Pokémon didn't resist him at all. If anything, it soothed him to sleep.
After that, the lead Kangaskhan leaned back against a rock while the rest of the herd gathered around it. Some lay down. Some rested against the stones. Before long, all of them were asleep.
"Found him," Reiji murmured, lowering the binoculars. Then he leaned back against a tree trunk and started thinking. "Now the question is how to convince him to come back with me."
The boy had gone missing at the age of three. He might not remember anything from before that, but that wasn't the real problem. Darkrai could put him under sleep and give him a vivid dream—one strong enough to drag those childhood memories back up.
Making the boy remember his early life, his parents, his family, the human world—that part was easy.
The hard part would be persuading him to leave the Kangaskhan herd and return to human society.
He had been cut off from people for far too long. Pulling him away from the bond he had with the Kangaskhan would not be easy.
Reiji could always tie him up and drag him back, but that would only solve the problem on the surface. The boy would just run back to the herd the first chance he got. If that happened, the hundred million Pokédollars in reward money would be hard to hold with a straight face. He needed the boy to go willingly.
"Darkrai, the hypnosis is on you. Make him remember his childhood. Pull his mind back toward being human instead of leaving him convinced he's a Kangaskhan cub."
"Easy enough." Darkrai slipped quietly out of the shadows, moved over to the sleeping herd, and sank into the shadow of the lead Kangaskhan to influence the boy's dream.
That night, the boy had a strange dream.
He dreamed of the estate where he had lived as a child. He dreamed of toys, rich food, a huge house, big rooms, a soft bed, and crowds of people moving through the halls. He dreamed of his parents playing with him.
Then came the day they flew to the jungle in a helicopter.
He fell out.
Luckily, the parachute opened on its own, and that was what saved him.
His parents never found him afterward. He had climbed down from the parachute himself, wandered through the jungle out of curiosity, and gotten lost.
In the end, he had found the Kangaskhan herd. They had taken him in, and he had lived with them ever since, slowly forgetting the human world—until tonight, when that strange dream dragged it all back.
Bang—
The dream shattered.
The boy woke with a start and looked around.
He was still in the middle of the Kangaskhan herd, wrapped in the warmth of the pouch. The moon shone bright overhead. Then he remembered the dream. He hadn't dreamed in years.
Were those really his parents?
Why didn't he remember them at all?
That part left him confused and unsettled.
Then he noticed a blinking green light deeper in the forest. It was Darkrai's hypnosis, feeding his eyes something unreal and luring him along with it.
Driven by curiosity, the boy climbed out of the Kangaskhan's pouch and followed the flickering green light into the woods.
Reiji was waiting for him there.
Only after the boy had wandered far enough from the herd did Reiji step out and block his path.
"Tommy, do you remember who you are?"
"Tommy?" The boy frowned and thought about it. That name had been in the dream too.
Then his expression changed. "No... wait. Why am I in the forest? Who are you? Are you here to catch the Kangaskhan?"
"Who am I?" Reiji smiled. So the feral kid hadn't lost the ability to speak after all. That made things easier. "Your parents put out a missing-person notice years ago. They've been searching for you ever since. Come with me."
"No! I'm not going with you!" the boy shouted. "You're a bad guy! You just want to poach the Kangaskhan!"
He pulled out his weapon—a boomerang—and hurled it straight at Reiji.
"Heh. Brat." Reiji had known it wouldn't be that simple. If words didn't work, then he would have to convince him the hard way. "Scyther."
"Scy." Scyther didn't even bother looking up properly. One lazy flick of its scythe cut the boomerang clean in half.
"You can't even protect yourself," Reiji said as he advanced on the boy step by step. "What makes you think you can protect the Kangaskhan herd?"
The kid had lived with the Kangaskhan too long and had been protected too well. He had no idea how ugly the outside world could be.
Tonight, Reiji was going to show him what a real bastard looked like.
"D-d-don't come any closer!" Tommy panicked the moment he saw his boomerang split apart. Without it, he had no weapon left.
All he could do was snatch up a little branch from the ground and wave it wildly in front of him.
Reiji took the stick away, grabbed Tommy when he tried to run, and nearly gagged from the smell.
The kid absolutely reeked.
Which made sense. Tommy spent most of his time inside a Kangaskhan's pouch, and that kind of smell was exactly what you would expect.
If a Kangaskhan had a Trainer, the pouch could be cleaned regularly. Wild Kangaskhan obviously didn't have that luxury.
Reiji held Tommy still, ignored the stench as best he could, yanked aside the leopard-skin wrap, and smacked him across the backside.
Smack! Smack! Smack!
"You can't even protect yourself, so how are you supposed to protect the Kangaskhan? Say I really did want to capture them—what could you do about it? Can you beat me?"
He lectured Tommy while smacking him, because at this point the wild brat clearly needed a hard lesson more than anything else.
"Stop hitting me! Stop! I'll say whatever you want, okay? Just stop hitting me!" Tommy wailed, twisting and yelping in surrender.
Reiji finally stopped and let the foul-smelling boy go.
The instant his feet hit the ground, Tommy grabbed a vine, swung away, and shouted back excitedly, "I'm not going with you! Kangaskhan is my mom! Nyah! Come catch me if you can!"
"Heh. Darkrai, keep sending him back into dreams until he agrees to go."
"Understood."
Darkrai followed the fleeing Tommy back to the herd. Tommy slipped quietly into the lead Kangaskhan's pouch again and pretended none of it had happened.
As long as he was back inside that pouch, he was safe.
That was how it had always been.
Tommy had left.
Tommy had gotten spanked.
Tommy had come back.
The lead Kangaskhan noticed none of it at all. It slept soundly through the whole thing.
Then Tommy started dreaming again.
Once more he saw the great estate and the human parents from before.
This time, Darkrai turned it into a loop. Tommy kept reliving the memories from before he turned three. There weren't many of them to begin with, and Darkrai accelerated the dream besides.
Five minutes in reality could stretch into months inside the dream.
One dream could last months. Several loops in a row felt like years.
So in the span of barely half an hour, Tommy relived those memories over and over, all of them tied to his human parents. By the end of it, he was sure of a few things.
His name really was Tommy.
He really did have a home in the human world.
He really did have human parents.
And he was not a Pokémon.
After that, he didn't dare go back to sleep. He was too afraid he would start dreaming again.
So he climbed out and sat on a rock, staring up at the moon and the stars.
Then the night exploded.
Whump—whump—whump—
Huge nets dropped out of nowhere and spread over the sleeping Kangaskhan herd.
Then came the darts.
One after another, tranquilizer needles shot through the dark and sank into the startled Kangaskhan. Every one of them took at least two. The whole herd went numb, then collapsed back into drugged sleep.
"We hit the jackpot! A whole Kangaskhan herd—this haul's worth several hundred million at least!"
"Heh. Move it! Throw the Poké Balls, bag the Kangaskhan, and get out! That noise already tipped off Officer Jenny. We don't have much time!"
"All right!"
The Pokémon hunters hurled Poké Balls at the sedated Kangaskhan one after another, collecting them off the grass.
"Poachers... damn it!" Tommy could do nothing except watch as the Kangaskhan were taken away. His boomerang was gone, cut in half by Scyther. All he could do was scream, "Stop! Stop! You can't take the Kangaskhan!"
"Huh? There's a kid here?" The two hunters looked at each other, both startled by the sudden human voice.
"No clue. Probably somebody's lost kid. Ignore him."
Tommy was tangled in the net and not interfering with them, so the hunters couldn't be bothered to care.
But the noise he was making quickly wore on one of them.
"Stop! You can't take the Kangaskhan! You bad guys—"
"Kid, you're loud." One of the hunters strode over and slapped Tommy hard across the face.
The hit left him reeling. One tooth flew loose. Blood spilled into his mouth.
"Keep yapping and I'll kill you." The hunter flashed a knife in front of him. He didn't mind killing a child. It just wasn't usually worth the trouble.
In this world, selling people didn't pay nearly as well as selling Pokémon.
That was why human trafficking was hard to turn into real business, unless you were a large organization recruiting new blood. And even then, most of the recruits were willing orphans.
There were plenty of those.
Promise them a full stomach and a path to becoming a Trainer, and a lot of them would come on their own.
That was how Team Rocket recruited too.
Reiji knew that from experience.
Tommy went silent at once.
He finally understood that if he kept screaming, he really would die.
And what the man in the forest had told him earlier had already come true.
Someone as weak as him couldn't protect the Kangaskhan herd.
He couldn't even protect himself.
All this time he had lived under the herd's protection. Reiji had been right.
A moment ago he had been proud of escaping.
But had he really escaped anything?
Inside or outside, he was still the same weak little boy.
He stared at the hunters in silence, his gaze turning cold in the dark. They didn't notice. He bit his lip so hard it hurt.
He still had to save the Kangaskhan herd.
He didn't dare shout.
He didn't want to die.
So all he could do was watch as the two hunters packed up every last Kangaskhan, shoved the Poké Balls into their bags, and left the grasslands without looking back.
Reiji watched the whole thing from the trees.
These two poachers had shown up at the perfect time. He could not have asked for a better assist.
Honestly, they were not his people. He had no idea where they had come from. The sudden commotion had startled him too, and then he had watched the entire herd get poached right in front of him.
His guess was that the cowboy from the bar had sold his information to other hunters as well. That was probably why these men had rushed over to snatch the Kangaskhan first.
Luckily, Reiji had never been after the Kangaskhan themselves. If he had been, the broker really would have played him.
Information dealers really were untrustworthy bastards.
Good thing the herd's location had at least been real.
If that part had been fake too, somebody would have bled for it.
[End of chapter]
[100 Power Stones = Extra Chapter]
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