Explanations:Tales, tidbits, trials, ideas, and just general stuff. Plus some stuff we thought we'd forgotten...
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Expositions: |
Exploitations:The crew: SWCThe mates: Sigs, Artie The means: Blogger Pro The motive: RASSM The opportunity: Pokémon The Excuse: Sith Wars The allies: DG (BoP), ObK, Tilson, Shaven Wookies, SWG The enemies: TJH The home: SWC The vanity: AFJ |
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Saturday, March 08, 2003 »Beginnings: Cages and Men She always knew that they were bad men. How she knew or when she figured it out she couldn't tell, but she could tell they were bad by the things they did. She knew the things they did were bad because she could feel the negative effects in ways these men probably never could. Ever since she was old enough to crawl, she'd been fascinated by these "pocket monsters" that pawed, mewed, and cried out to her. She spent most of her days around their cages. Watching them, listening to them, and petting them from outside their cages. She observed them from a quiet and earnest position and learned their different mannerisms if not their natural behavior in the wild, for she was never allowed to leave the compound that was on the edge of the forest surrounding Mt. Moon except for those times when she was actually needed if not wanted. She didn't mind the solitude as long as there was a Pokemon or some other sort of critter around. She'd keep as close to all of the Pokemon as possible: she put her plate on the floor so she could eat with them, moved her sleeping bag to the informal infirmary section when one Pokemon was taking a turn for the worse (and even do her best to cure them), and even let them out of their cages for a couple minutes when no one was looking. But back to these men for a minute. These men stole or captured Pokemon, put them into cages, and then either sold or trained them to do things they would not ordinarily do. Some trained them to fight in highly agressive ways for money, some sold them to rich people who wanted rare and ususual pets, and some fed them until they were overweight enough to be sold...and were never heard from again. Each cage was specially designed to house and contain the Pokemon to each of their types with sometimes disasterous results. Many a Pokemon died while wasting away at a cage bar. The adage that 'the ability to speak does not make one intelligent' was certainly credible because if these talkative types were intelligent, they would know how the Pokemon suffered so, would set them loose, and never cage another Pokemon ever again. She knew of their sufferings well as she too knew what it was like to be caged up and auctioned off to the highest bidder. Whenever she got into trouble for some inexplicable reason, she would get locked in the storage room for up to a week at a time, and when it was time to be useful, a man would come for her and she would pose as his daughter as to not raise suspiscion against the "trader". But don't worry, she wasn't prostituted. In fact, they neglected her as much as possible because none of them wanted to be responsible for an orphaned child. Cages. She didn't know why exactly each specific Pokemon was caged up, but she knew that her own highest crimes were that of curiosity, a curiosity that often got the best of her, and for that, she was called "Alice". She didn't know if it was her real name or not, but she knew that her name was Alice. She didn't know what her last name was and as far as the traders were concerned, she didn't have one because it changed each time a trader came to use her as a prop. But she knew she had one, just like she knew she had parents. Real ones. Not these men who would come up to her, say that he was her father, and then take her to help him go sell a hapless Pokemon. These men were not her parents, but these Pokemon were her family. Like her so-called "fathers", the Pokemon that consisted of her family were constantly changing. They were always getting sold or "traded" off, sometimes they died, and rarely they escaped. They would suffer in their cages in their own ways and try unsuccessfully to escape all day and often all night as well. They were constantly moving and the only times they ever did rest were either from exhaustion or death. But there was one thing all of them did: communicate. They communicated with each other and with their captors all the time, but unlike their bretheren critters, their captors never paid them any attention unless heaven forbid one of them tried to attack, escape, or resist in any way. But they also communicated with Alice. Her natural curiosity had a highly-focused intensity to it. As a result, she was very tenacious, and even tho she may have several projects going at once, she managed to finish them all even if it did take a good long time. Like the Pokemon she studied and befriended, Alice was blessed with several good instincts and was said to be able to understand the Pokemon in their own languages. Often she would Ponyta-whisper when she was allowed near the outside stables or mew along with the Meowth and Persians that would occupy one of the inner meetingrooms. She learned to understand the languages of the Pokemon before she finally decided to start speaking in her own. Most of the "traders" (in fact they were a range of smugglers, illegal breeders, poachers, and middlemen for more immoral trades) took her for a savant for the first 4 years of her life until one day she suddenly spoke her first word "no" when one breeder came to take her favorite Squirtle away. It was these cages and these men! They were the bane of her existence just as sure as she was the bane of theirs. After the incident with the Squirtle, she began to use her first word at every opportunity she could find: a captor shaking up a cage, a trader buying a desperate Pokemon, an abusive trainer, a smuggler trying to fit too many cages into the back of an unmarked van. For about 3 months, she was in that storeroom more often than she was with the Pokemon. And they both suffered for it. Alice began to speak more in her own language and for that some of the Pokemon felt that she was betraying them by turning from the strangest but kindest Pokemon they'd ever known into one of these "humans". Making the distinctions between "Pokemon", "good human", and "bad human" were concepts that Alice had to teach them so that they wouldn't lose the only true friendships the other had in their lives at that time. It wasn't easy on any of them as Alice's knacks for stealing food for the Pokemon and her screaming at the men to stop doing something because "the Pokemon said it's hurting them" were fast becoming dangerous. An old Hoothoot had to tell her to stop it or else those men would likely use her as an interpreter and goodness knows what kinds of things they could do with her to lure naive Pokemon or what sort of information from other Pokemon they would try to drag out of her. Word spead throughout the cages that they should stop talking to Alice because she could now talk to their common captors. Some of them even stopped accepting her stolen food. Even when Alice told her "fathers" that she was making it all up because after all she had a "highly active imagination", it didn't stop the suspicions from either the Pokemon or the humans. Those men were fast catching onto her and that what she'd been doing all of her life could be highly beneficial to them. And if she didn't catch onto her own reckless 5-year-old mouth, her whole world as well as those of who she loved most would soon crash down and dissolve. But something was soon to happen that would change everything.
♥ posted by RH/Alice at 8:09:00 PM |