Painted Paradise

Silver opened his eyes slowly, exhaustion still gripping his legs firmly to the ground like iron chains. He had blacked out after Nala left him, now he felt something soft and warm underneath him instead of cold dirt. He looked down to see he was on a soft pillow, easily big enough for him to stretch as much as he wanted. The pain had done down, and the scratches from his battle earlier with Nala had also vanished. Silver smelled a faint, but still detectable smell deep into his skin, leaving behind an oily residue. He recognized the scent; a bottle of full restore had been used on him.
A bowl was in front of him, but it was empty with only a few drops left. He felt a hot stare from across the room and looked up feebly from his bed. Nala was glaring at him with new waves of hatred before turning around and exiting the room all together, leaving behind only a faint trace of her scent. What had Silver done to her now to deserve this bran new anger toward him? Too tired to think about it, Silver rested his head back on the pillow and fell into the depths of sleep almost instantly.
He woke up feeling a bit more refreshed and got shakily to his paws, feeling fresh energy go through him. By the time he’d woken up again morning had come and gone, in fact it was almost the end of the afternoon! Briefly Silver wondered where he planned to sleep for the night, and then realized Nala’s scent was nowhere to be found. The hallway was nearly barren, with only a few workers shuffling along the hallway with the sharp scent of coffee tainting their breath. The collar around his neck felt increasingly uncomfortable, making him half to balance his weight awkwardly to avoid letting gravity make him fall forward.
Sharp piercing light shot out from behind the mountains in beams of amber, gold and fuchsia pink. The sun was beginning to dip under the mountain peaks, casting the last dazzling display of light before the moon replaced its radiant glow. Silver felt new joy slither through his stomach; he had missed the sunset even though he’d hardly been without it. The sunset wasn’t what he missed most in the sky though; the moon always caught his attention. There were no words to explain, he had always felt attracted to the moon, his favorite natural feature. It seemed to glow with dignity every night, painting the Earth with light that only it could gift during the blackness of night, basking the Earth with warmth despite the heat that its chilled rays lacked.
A familiar shape was basking on a jutting rock on the far side of the camp; her cream fur turned between Timberwolf gray and silver, with her mulberry tail and ears shining Cerise. Silver nearly ducked out before realizing Nala was turned the complete opposite way looking too deep in thought to notice him. He turned back and approached slowly, keeping low to the ground. When he climbed to the top of the rock, Nala didn’t move. She kept looking at the display of lights in front of her, its sharp colors slowly fading to pale weak rays. Silver felt his mouth go cotton dry, what was he suppose to do?
They both continued watching the sunset until all the light had turned to weak to emit anything as beautiful as it used to be, soon losing its flare all together. The moon was just beginning to gain its color, slowly gathering its glow like a candle flame desperate to day alive. The moon was only a night away from being a full moon, its perfect circle slightly irregular in the sky. Dark patches peppered the king of the night, glowing neon with dark periwinkle. Silver stared in awe, this was what he loved. Stars blinked sleepily in the sky, just barely taking on the full power it could shed if it wanted too. The Milky Way was breathless tonight, clear and open in the forest, easy to see without the oaks and pines blocking it.
The moon was the biggest yet, shining with all the power of a super nova. Silver realized he had taken it for granted so often, loving the night sky but never really thinking about it ever not being there. A quiet purr threatened to break the silence in Silver’s chest as he let the rhythmic song of night lull him, the buzzing of nocturnal things running free in the forest. The silence ran on, making Silver feel free as a bird type. This was the best he’d felt since he arrived at the base, for years even! Everything seemed so peaceful and not so rushed, taken by step. Silver felt new admiration and respect he didn’t think would ever come for Nala. If this is what she did every night, then she had a good idea how to exploit beautiful things for everything it was worth.
“Sorry,” Silver whispered, deciding it was time to break the silence. Glancing at Nala he had feared his apology went to a sleeping Meowth, but her ears perked immediately with a soft purr following. “For what?” she whispered back, some of her old liveliness in it this time. “I don’t know, but you always seem on edge around me. I feel like I’ve done something wrong.” Nala didn’t change her stare at the night sky. “I’ve been thinking about it a lot,” she meowed quietly. “About how I spend my life compared to yours.”
Silver stared surprised at her; she hardly knew anything about him? After Silver gave her a questioning look, she went on. “I mean about the cage Pokémon and me,” she whispered gently. “I know it doesn’t look it, but I really do feel bad for them sometimes.” She looked away with embarrassment heating her mulberry colored ears. “I actually have a crush on one of them,” she went on. “I think his name is Kokam or something? But he took some other Meowth as a mate and has mocked me ever since.” Silver blinked, why was she telling him all this with so much confidence?
“Today when he was laughing with the others, it really hurt.” Silver didn’t know what to say, what could he say? He had no business knowing this! He wanted to be under the same stars and night but on a huge rock with Nisa, their kits sleeping in a puddle of fur next to their mother. “You wouldn’t do that to me would you?” she ventured, turning her gaze on him with nothing but seriousness in them. Silver faltered, that’s exactly what he’d wanted to do since he got here. “It’s okay, you don’t half to answer,” she mumbled with a touch of pain after Silver hesitated. “I probably would have accused you of lying if you’d said no anyway.”
Silver blinked sympathetically at her, not knowing what to do accept lay his head on her front paws and accept the silence again. “After they found you behind the building,” she went on slowly, “Max almost trampled me and ran to get you. Then they blocked my hole with some cinder blocks as well as the hole at the fence.” Silver cringed, he felt bad for her even though the words were selfish. “I’m sorry that happened,” he mumbled but Nala cut him off. “It just stunned me because I thought I’d killed you or something.” Silver heard a touch of amusement in her voice, but also fear there.
“I think you’re going to be here a long time if Max did that, he never shows such a motherly instinct like that before. If I’d been in that situation he would have told me to shake it off,” she laughed slightly. Silver was about to say something to comfort her but she went on, “I think we should learn more about each other so I don’t half to walk around with a stranger on my tail.”
Silver felt a tickle of horror creep down his back, there was so much she wouldn’t approve of! “I’ll start,” she suggested quickly. “I was born in a forest first and only lasted a few days before some bratty trainer caught me. He didn’t even go to gyms or anything, just brought me around and boasted to people about how he caught a shiny or something like that, whatever that was.” She rolled her eyes, making Silver automatically imagine a nerdy kid holding a tiny kitten in his hands and thrusting it in people’s faces about his top percentage Meowth and then asking for their number.
“After a few months of that, Max came in. He offered a trade, me for his golden Magikarp. I’m apparently lower than a golden Magikarp because he dropped me instantly and started squealing about a red gyarados or something.” She went on, “Max brought me here which back then was a pathetic shed filled with plans and such for building some huge building. I’ve been his number one since, after that he built Team Magma’s base and started talking it up about our Pokémon mascot being a houndoom, something about another something called Groundon and something something ‘this building will show Team Aqua whose boss.’”
“Soon after that some other team decided it would be awesome to outdo us by building an even bigger camp on the other side of the forest and name it Team Rocket. Their building is huge and they have way more money than we do.” Silver flinched at the disgust in the words ‘Team Rocket.’ “The thing is Team Rocket has a smarter boss, as much as I’d hate to admit it, and a lot more money. They also get tons of funds from the government for having the eighth and final gym located at the next stop of a train just beyond the forest. All he does is whip out some over-powered Pokémon he has the money to afford, beat the challenger with no mercy with it, then receive the funds and not spend it on the gym at all.” She went on with a sigh, “as much as I’d hate to admit it, if Team Rocket weren’t too cheap to hire top class workers like Team Magma has, then they could cream us. But they’re too cheap and love to boast about how much money they have so therefore makes do with anyone who’s willing to risk their hides for a job.”
Silver nodded in understanding, he’d thought about that too before when he was working with Giovanni, but it still made him angry with indignity at how she pointed it out so smugly. Deciding it was his turn to speak, Silver braced himself with everything he felt obligated to tell her. He explained about his illness Lassitudia, how he was taken in as Giovanni’s lap cat in Team Rocket and how he too had seen the development of the giant building in the forest before he was kicked out of his home and moved to the forest. He explained about Nisa and his kits, how his illness had made his kits weak and how when he was taken into Team Magma that he had left behind his mate and dying kittens.
Nala had nodded at every major event and kept silent for a few moments after he had finished. Silver had expected wide eyes of surprise, gasps of horror, hisses of disagreement, but Nala had remained silent and gave nothing away the entire time. Then again, Silver quickly learned it was entirely impossible to guess Nala’s reaction to anything. “That means Team Rocket is weak,” she smirked. Silver widened his eyes, is that the only part she cared about in his story? The fire in her eyes went out when she saw Silvers shocked and horrified expression. “Sorry, it’s just that they always think they’re better than us and they’re always flashing off how it’s some big dept we owe him and good karma that he hasn’t kicked us out of the forest at all when we were here first. After that our biggest rivals decided it would be just dandy to build their base behind the protection of Team Rocket next to the ocean.”
Her glare hardened angrily, “Team Rocket are always yelling at us that if we set one foot out of our base that they’ll have fifty Nidokings ram our base and destroy it, meanwhile they don’t even realize Team Aqua is even there because they aren’t actually IN the forest!” Silver lashed his tail angrily but kept his ground. “Team Rocket is much more famous and has several under cover workers around the world sending money to them. Giovanni- that’s the team’s leader- knows what he’s doing even though it doesn’t look like it. He could destroy a country at the snap of his fingers!” he boasted, tail high.
Nala rolled her eyes, “well there’s no doubt you weren’t lying when you said you came from them, you’re just as bad as they are!” Silver searched for the sarcastic spark in her voice that seemed it should have been there, but came up empty. “I’ve heard that Team Rocket’s large expanse of workers make up eighty percent of the region’s crime,” she ventured. “I’ve even heard he’s actually going out of Kanto and smacking another base on other regions! We of course have some in other regions that collect rare Pokémon there, but he’s just going wild with it.” She shook her head, “there’s a ton of good that comes out of it though. He’s asking just anyone to do it, that means pretty much everybody with no money to spend but families to feed join up easily. Its low pay, but its green and that’s all anyone cares about.”
Silver understood completely, he knew Giovanni would have been a lot higher on the brink of taking over the world if he’d just been patient enough and more organized to make a general plan rather than throwing workers out to get him money and popularity. “That’s why I like Team Magma, they may be pretty fragile right now, but I think they got the brains to get just as high as Team Rocket if not higher!” a smile tugged at her lips, “Giovanni doesn’t realize when it comes to being evil, then having a ton of people know your name isn’t exactly what you want to strive for.”
“He must be doing something right,” Silver put in quietly, “he’s world famous for being unmerciful and a serious threat.” Nala rolled her eyes again, “I think he’s shooting way to big. He wants to take over the whole world with about a million Pokémon at his disposal. Unless you’re the reincarnation of Arceus’s ashes, I doubt that’ll ever happen in a single life time.” Silver blinked, suddenly interested. “What does Team Magma want?” he asked, genially interested in what they wanted in their evil-doing. He had never stopped to wonder or care when he was with Giovanni, even though he constantly talked bad about them in his office.
Nala’s eyes brightened at the prospect of getting to tell her story to someone. “Team Magma is a bit like Team Rocket, but they have a lot sharper idea of how they’re going to do things,” she mewed excitedly. “They want to awaken a legendary Pokémon named Groudon, you hear a lot about him if you’re a worker of Team Magma, and expand Earth’s amount of landmass.” She rushed on, “Our plan is to find the fossil of Groudon. Groudon is an ancient Pokémon which makes sense because it kind of looks like an ugly red dinosaur.”
“Its fossil is supposed to be in some kind of pretty rock but its miles under the ground and could be anywhere, pretty much impossible to find. That’s why we have a bunch of workers looking for ancient ruins for signs and stealing money to fund their expeditions. Once we find it, Max plans to restore it and possibly bring it back to life.” Silver’s eyes widened, “why would he want to do that?”
“A couple of reasons,” she answered swiftly, “he wants to expand the landmass so land Pokémon will have more room to use, saying that humans are becoming over populated and if we use up some of the ocean, then millions of Pokémon will be saved in the future when the humans run out of space.”
“What about Team Aqua?” Silver asked bravely. “Team Aqua want to awaken Kyrogre, which is another ancient legendary set to expand the oceans. The two of them where kind of what made the Earth, pushing to and fro with landmass and oceans until they died with Kyrogre I guess being in the lead with more ocean, but Groudon also winning because the ocean is on top of the Earth’s plates or whatever,” she went on. “Team Aqua wants to expand the ocean because Water type Pokémon make up most of the Pokémon that inhabit Earth and think it would be against the Pokémon to force Water types to move their homes. They say expanding the landmass will kill millions of Water types. Because of this, Team Aqua was made in response to Team Magma’s birth, followed by the pursuit of Kyrogre.”
“They went to find Kyrogre at first to stop Groudon if it was ever released, but soon after it just became its own team instead of what would stop team Magma. They want to expand the oceans because most of these Team Aqua people are Water type fanatics and want there to be more room for water types while team magma want more room for all the Pokémon on land, mostly fire types.” Silver blinked with all the new information, all Team Rocket want was supreme power over everything! It was a huge idea and a lot less focused and organized than Team Magma or Team Aqua’s.
“That’s a lot to accomplish,” he meowed in surprise. “Yes, it’s a constant race against Team Aqua and who will find their special legendary Pokémon and awaken it first.” She looked to the sky for a moment, then turned to him with a smile on her face. “I’m glad you know everything about us now, I think you’re going to be here for a while.” Silver flinched, he didn’t WANT to be here, he wanted to leave as soon as he could, but how could he with the electrical collar around his neck in chains?
“Why did you tell me everything?” Silver questioned bravely. She studied him for a while, “like I said,” she mewed. “Max has a lot of interest in you.” Silver lashed his tail in frustration. “So?”
“I think you’re somehow connected to what he’s been waiting for. You might somehow be the ticket to exactly what Max is trying to get too.”