Waifu or dutiful son? That was the question, and right now Akiyama was standing on the wrong end of it.
"Dad. You're seriously done with me?"
He stood outside the manor's iron gate, Ralts held tight against his chest.
"Pick a different Pokémon." Mikis Masaki looked at his son through the bars, his voice flat as stone. "That one will never amount to anything."
Ralts tilted her head up. Behind the fringe of green that hid her eyes, the light dimmed.
She let out a soft cry. She knew what she was—broken—and she knew it was costing the person she loved most.
"Not happening, old man."
Akiyama rested a hand on her head, turned, and walked.
"Then you'd better come back here with a Championship trophy," his father said, laughing without any warmth in it, and reached for the gate.
It slammed shut behind him. The climbing roses on either side shivered in the draft, shedding a few browned petals onto the path.
"Ralts... ralts..."
Ralts squirmed, pushing against his arms, trying to get free.
If she just wasn't here, Akiyama wouldn't have to fight with his father.
"Relax." He smoothed her head again. "Family or no family, I'll keep you fat and happy."
He tucked her firmly back into the crook of his arm and started down the flower-lined lane, away from the estate.
He hadn't been born to this world. In the last one he'd been an ordinary wage slave, grinding out overtime like everybody else—and then somehow he'd woken up as an infant here.
This place looked a lot like the Pokémon franchise he remembered. It also differed in ways that mattered.
The Mikis were a psychic dynasty. Across the whole region their name meant Psychic-types and human psychics, and above all it meant Gardevoir and Gallade.
The Ralts in his arms had been born the same day he had. By Miki tradition, that made her his partner for life.
Except.
Akiyama looked down at the horn on her forehead.
It wasn't like other Ralts' horns. A section was simply gone, the edge clean, as if something had sheared straight through the middle of it.
It had been that way from the moment she was born.
She couldn't sense the emotions of humans or Pokémon. She'd also lost the instinct that let her kind reach out and touch fantasy energy.
A normal Ralts evolved into a Gardevoir with a base Special Attack of 125. His might scrape 60. Maybe less.
But that didn't matter. Base stats were just a framework he'd dragged over from another life, a way of squinting at the world sideways.
Nobody here had ever heard the term. All anyone would say about her was that she couldn't feel emotion and that fantasy energy had never loved her.
And nowhere was it written that a Ralts couldn't fight with her fists. This wasn't a game.
Sure, in the old numbers, Gardevoir's physical attack was a joke. That rule didn't apply here.
A Pokémon's ceiling wasn't handed down from heaven.
They weren't data. They weren't cold little models with their endings already written.
"Champion, huh?" Akiyama murmured.
The Pokémon League was the biggest event in his region. It was also the main pipeline that fed the Elite Four and the Champion's seat.
"One regional Championship. Please. Easy money."
He was, if nothing else, an optimist.
Even with less than a few months on the clock.
.....
Inside the manor, Masaki stood facing a blue Gallade.
"You think I went too far."
Gallade nodded.
"It's one Ralts. Even if she's nothing but a pretty face, I could keep the pair of them fed for the rest of their lives. But the boy has to grow up sometime."
Gallade signed something back.
"Too young? Fourteen isn't young. I was sixteen before I set out with you, and we only made it through seven of the nine regions. Still bothers me."
He was quiet a moment.
"Will he hold it against me? He's not that dense. And even if he is—"
He almost smiled.
"—there's nothing wrong with being the mountain your son has to climb."
Not even a tiger devours its own cubs. He wasn't about to disown the boy for making the right call, and the boy had made the right call.
It was just that some things weren't a child's business.
In silence, he reached over and rubbed the forehead of his oldest friend.
.....
Ralts stood on the windowsill of the train car, watching Greenleaf Town shrink into the distance.
Akiyama sat back in his seat, eyes narrowed at the progress bar hanging in the air in front of him—the one only he could see.
Fourteen years. About time you filled up.
100%!
The number ticked over. The bar shifted from blue-white to gold.
So. What exactly are you good for?
"Ral-lu?"
They'd lived side by side for fourteen years. Ralts caught the change in his expression from the smallest shift of his mouth and cocked her head at him, puzzled, the one visible red eye blinking up at him.
—
Memories are pearls. Friendship is diamonds.