//------------------------------// // Chapter 1 // Story: Rock Type // by TDR //------------------------------// Rock Type Another Story in Stone By TDR A faint bonging sound filled the air, the church on the hill's bell tower sounding midnight. The existence of the church some what bothered me, after all the last church I had known about was run by a cult that tried to kill me and my friends and take over our position as my love's Generals. That didn't go well for them. Or us really. I shook my head sitting up. I really shouldn't complain. I willingly gave up my last life to move to the next. Granted I had expected to meet my friends and love again, though that hadn't happened. Yet. I smiled a little, showing more pronounced canines than most people had. Something I inherited from my grandfather. That was the best thing about this. My family was alive still. My grandfather wasn't a pokemon trainer. In fact most other pokemon tended to avoid him aside from my grandmother's team. My grandmother was a war hero, in Galor any way, she even had the sword granted upon retirement to soldiers of merit. Imagine my surprise when it was the same blade I used before I got the Waning Moon. She was a dragon type trainer and she had her team with her. Oddly there were only five, and all of them were friendly with my grandfather when no other pokemon wanted anything to do with him. Curious. I expected I knew the reason of course, but I wondered how it was done. I wasn't dumb enough to bring it up. An old picture of her in one of her scrapbooks showed her standing with her team holding the crushed and burned flag of some nation that no longer existed that had attack Galor years ago. There was her Dragalge, a Garchomp, Flygon, Dragapult, Dragonite, and a Goodra. She didn't have the Garchomp any more. Might explain my family's teeth to be fair. My grandfather was a rather large man, though one with a legendary temper. He worked odd jobs around town and when he and my grandmother moved into town he built the house we live in. He was well liked around town by the humans, less so by the criminal element. Word is when he was younger he took on three members of Team Rocket who came into town by himself, and beat the fool out of all three of them and their pokemon teams on his own. When asked he looked smug, though my grandmother refused to let him stay that way long. My father was a local cop after serving some time in the military, never really dealing with anything more than a few training skirmishes and displays of military pomp. When he quit he took his team and joined the local police. He only had an emboar and a talon flame, but he was quite skilled with them. My mother..... she was still alive here to. But she had the same situation. She came from a rich family, and was somewhat frail. She met and fell for my father during some dress event the military and the nobles got up to. When her family found out they disowned her and she and my father moved here to Kanto to live with his parents. My grandfather expanded the house and a few years later I was born. My mother is physically frail and it was feared she would die in child birth with me, but she didn't and I actually have lived this long with parents and grandparents. Even her side of the family isn't as bad as they were in my other life. They hate my father, but they acknowledge that I exist. I'll even get gifts from them on my birthday, though I don't think they have ever visited. My mother was a trainer who made it through the Galor gym challenges before she had to stop due to her health. Her main team is a Dewott she never managed to evolve all the way, a slowbro, a wingull, a febas she picked up recently she is trying to evolve, and the two eevee her parents gave her before she set out, now a Vaporeon and a Espeon. The pair of them practically adopted me after I was born, though that was mostly due to the Espeon knowing I was odd. Not to say my life is perfect. Some bad things followed me from my past life. I still have nightmares, bad ones. And when I was four my fear of deep water became very very noticeable. To a lesser extent my hatred of oranges has been noticed, but at the same time everyone thinks that's just me being a picky eater. Which is a little odd given I still follow the military mentality of eating everything put before me as there's no telling when my next meal will happen. But back to the phobia. My parents took me to a specialist in phobias and he worked with me for a few sessions before deciding to pass me off to another expert. This expert decided to go straight to immersion therapy by literally tossing me into the deep end of a pool. Now I might have the mind of a extremely long lived unicorn warrior, but at the time I was also a five year old kid with no way to save myself, no clue I was going to be pulled out of the water either, as some guy I just met threw me into a pool after leading me away from my parents for his trick. Evidently the panic and terror I felt was so bad that every psychic type pokemon from nearly two miles around felt it and appeared in the pool area, trained, wild, or other wise. They assessed the situation, rescued me, and proceeded to reduce said doctor to a corpse as well as level most of his office before most people even knew anything was happening. The event was the talk of the town for months, and it was still brought up every so often. Occasionally a psychic type trainer will show up to check me out, though I don't have any rapport with any psychic types. Seems this was a bit of a one off. Still that event had my moms two eeveeloutions hang around me that much more. I don't think I could even take a bath without the pair of them being there. It was about that point I started to train as well. I was too relaxed and some jackass decided to toss the aquaphobic who couldn't fight back into the water. that wasn't going to happen again without a fight. I put on a good bit of muscle and built my endurance up considerably. I even managed to talk my grandmother and father into some sword lessons. Hands are amazing. I miss my horn, but holy fuck the things I can do with hands with a blade. I don't expect them to give me a sword as most fighting is done with pokemon after all. I mean I was still a kid. I wasn't going to throw around an onix or anything, but when I started school no one even considered bullying me. Those who decided to pick on others also found I wouldn't allow that I wasn't very fond of that either. One child who decided that he was going to sneak in a caterpie to help with his bullying found out that while I might not have been strong enough to wrestle a machoke, I was more than strong enough to grab his caterpie by the tail and beat him with it. The caterpie was treated at the poke-center, the kid had to go to the dentist, and I was brought before a large amount of angry adults to explain my actions. Lucky for me I had a long history in my previous life of explaining my actions. All I had to do was counter question them about what might have happened had the kid brought in a weedle with poison sting rather than caterpie with string shot. The officals mulled over this for a while and the subject was dropped particularly with all the other kids on my side. Of course I was watched for a while after that, and my parents grounded me, but ehh, at least I wasn't expelled. Not to say school was all fights and events, I spent a lot of time studying. My reading comprehension and mathematics were fairly high, but my geography skill was the same as everyone elses, and my grammar and writing was crap, I kept falling back to Equestrian grammar and it looked weird and wrong compared to the language here. hands were great, but i had spent too long using my horn or mouth it felt weird. I made friends of course, but not like the ones I left, learning how to be a child again was hard, so I wasn't that good at it and I never got super close to anyone. Though I did get invited to birthday parties, sooo maybe I was popular? I don't know it's not something I ever bothered to think about, even with the kids I had in the past. Dawn was rather outgoing after all, she got invited to everything. So here I was, sitting on the roof of my parents house, awake in the early morning due to nightmares, with a phobia of deep water that bordered on manic and a Gym challenge to head out to in the morning. And somewhere out there, might be the five individuals that I cared about more than any one else, save maybe my kids. Who might also be out there. Would they know me? Would I know them? Did they remember or was it just me due to some sort of cosmic stupidity? No one in town was one of them. There wasn't any sort of connection or sign that I could tell. And it's not like I looked that different. A fairly buff ten year old with short ragged amber hair, slightly pale skin, and a left green eye with a right red eye. That caused a stir as well. So much so that many of the older folk in the town were wary of me as being a stars cursed child. Too many problems, too many oddities about me and some old biddies start throwing holy salt at me to ward off evil. So of course I played into that to fuck with them until my mom made me stop. Grandpa thought it was funny. “...Eeeeon......?” I looked up at the soft call seeing a pair of pink ears poking up out of the window to my room below me on the roof. “I'm fine Espeon. Just came out to look at the stars.” I called down softly. The eeveeloution turned her head peering up over the arching sil over my window, her eyes narrowed at me as she huffed, she didn't like me being up here, though I didn't have a phobia of heights at all. I rose and slid down the side of the roof to where she was poking out of my window glaring at me. She backed up and I dropped into my room with a small smirk, trying to defuse the glare before I reached out and ran my fingers under her chin. “You need to stop worrying so much. Leave that to mom. I am gonna be leaving for a while later today.” She frowned nipping my fingers in protest her large ears flattening to her head. “Don't give me that you knew this was coming. And I also know you're upset you can't come with me. But you have your own eggs to take care of. Two of them too. Focus on your Eevees I'll be fine.” I offered getting another huff from her. This was going to be a interesting trip. I don't think I had ever set out any where before with someone back home worried about me. At least not until after the Tirek incident, but that was different. Perils of being a solider.