I Remember You

The Castle of the Sky might seem like a strange meeting place to some but to Ulixes, it made sense. It was highly unlikely anyone else would be lurking around to bother him; few were brave enough to wander the halls of the castle, and even fewer had enough wits not to be killed by one of the many dragons that claimed the castle as their home. But Ulixes and his sister were different; Ulixes was sure of it. Dragons seemed child’s play compared to their childhood.

Ulixes hadn’t been nervous for a long time, but now, he was nervous. He hadn’t seen his sister for years and he found himself actually caring about what she thought of him. He hoped he hadn’t become weak in the time that they’d been separated. It angered him how much his hands shook. He clenched them and took to pacing. He wondered if she’d still have that green hair of hers, or if she’d be able to recognize him. He hadn’t changed much, but he’d grown half a foot taller.

Finally, he saw a figure approaching the castle. He couldn’t even tell if the person was green-headed from so far away; he didn’t care. He ran down the steps to the castle’s door. But the stranger wasn’t his sister; just some boy who kept glancing over his shoulder. Ulixes sulked back into the castle, feeling like a fool for rushing down. What would Nikki have though, if it had been her and he’d come racing down to greet her like that, like some impatient child? That wouldn’t do if he wanted Nikki to be proud of him.

He wondered if his sister had already arrived and was somewhere within the castle’s chambers, looking for him, so he started meandering around the dark stones and shadows of the first floor’s rooms.

In one of the rooms he heard quite a ruckus. Upon entering, he saw some suited guy battling a dragon. He moved on, unwilling to help when he still had his sister to find.

Room after room after room, and still no sign of the green haired girl who had raised Ulixes. Eventually, he couldn’t remember which rooms he’d checked and which rooms she might be in; they all looked the same and it began to dawn on him that he was lost. When he finally happened upon Suit Guy again, his impatience had over ruled his normal antipathy for people.

“Hey,” he said to the man, who was kneeling next to a dead dragon and trying to clean his sword (dragon-blood stains are impossible to remove), “any chance you’ve seen a lady pass by with green hair? Or any girl at all?”

The man had light blonde hair and dark-lensed glasses. Everything about him seemed absurdly stupid and out of place to Ulixes; who wears suits to fight dragons? And who wears sunglasses inside such a dark building? Ulixes sneered at him as he awaited an answer, but the man’s face was as emotionless as a piece of driftwood. Ulixes already hated him.

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He wasn't afraid.

In the midst of the fray - horrendous shrieks of pain, victory, or lust of battle, flashes of silver and blue, the scarlet rain that splattered every person in the room whenever it appeared - he couldn't even find it in him himself to be afraid. It didn't matter that a Hydreigon three times the size of he, his Skarmory, and his Altaria was flying at all three, all teeth and claws and huger for human and Pokemon flesh alike. It didn't matter that his own Pokemon were as rabid as they were in days of the past, eyes dancing with the need to rip everything that stood in their way but their own partners and master into microscopic bits. It didn't matter that he was forced to be put on the offensive as much as the creatures he tried to command, having been forced to draw out his own blade in order to slash at the behemoth the moment it decided to aim for what it believed was the weakest link. And, while that might have been true, the weakest link could still put up enough of a fight to not have a stratch on him after half an hour of being in the middle of a bloody strife.

He wasn't afraid.

No one would even be able to recognized the dragon's blood stains in his red suit after he washed them out, anyway.

The weather was the absolute last thing on his mind. Not that he had even seen what it was like outside since that morning, slipping into the arm's of the Castle in the Sky in the early hours and refusing to leave until each and every one of his party was exhausted and had worn off their violent tendancies to last them another few years. It had been a few weeks ago when he, himself had started getting that familiar iche for battle. However, while it wore off in a day or so, he found it had only rubbed off on the birds he raised and had not worn off since. It was when one had started attempting to tear down trees around his home and had scared off a new trainer that he decided to take another break and see if htere was anything he could do to solve the problem. The nearby Pokemon Center staff told him to take them to a place where they would be challenged by wild Pokemon or trainers and wear them off and they would be fine. Apparently, this happened to veteran trainers' Pokemon quite often. Sadly, there were few places that provided a challenge and there was no way in the Distortion World that he was going to allow himself to let any of his Pocket Monsters within a ten foot radius of anyone else's in the state they were currently in. It'd be as bad a blood bath as the fight he was currently in and he was not going to face the problems that would follow that.

So, instead, he'd traveled across the region by a variety of means to visit the place where Pokemon were said to be at their strongest in the wild. Dragon-type Pokemon were formidable foes on their own, but these ones were particularly outrageous. It only took one of his flying-types to take down even the most violent of Pokemon here, of course, but he decided to allow two at once after he'd nearly taken what could have been a fatal blow had it not missed. Not even his sword could have protected him from that. By now, it was already noon and his Pokemon were looking as lively as they had in the morning. However, he could see the signs; it would only take another hour or so and they could all go home and the birds would revert back to their normal, peaceful selves. At least then he could sleep without fearing they'd tear down the entirety of Hikari's Forest overnight and have the league breathing down his neck for just another royal failure.

The researcher took it as a good sign when - as the massive Hydreigon stopped its relentless assault, too exhausted to carry on - his Skarmory and Altaria stepped down in order to let he, himself deliver the finishing more. He was happy to oblidge. Gesturing for the cloud-like duel-type to lift him to a height where he could deal a fitting fatality, he road the creature up into the air before leap down, stabbing the creature's forehead and letting gravity drag him and his sword down toward the ground. As their enemy began to writhe in pain and he'd found himself a suitable distance away from the ground, he ripping the blade from the creature's body and came crashing to the ground himself. It didn't take another five minutes before blood loss got the better of the dragon-type and it collapsed to the ground in a much more painful manner. It wouldn't be long before the poor thing was dead.

Fetching a towel, the blonde set about wiping as much blood from his face and hair as he could. Obviously, he given up trying to clean it out for good early on in this blood bath, but it was nice to be able to see and not have the crimson fluid from another being trailing down and into his eyes. Next, he set about the equally frivolous task of cleaning off the same substance from his weapon as his Altaria let out and overjoyed cry in the background. Another good sign. Earlier on, all she had done was growl at him whenever he got to close, still trapped in the heat of battle mentally. Setting the sword down, though still not quite down, he shot a thumbs up to the two before returning them both to their respective Poke' Balls. He'd only just picked up his weapon again when the door openned - hadn't it openned before? He thought it did, but he couldn't be sure - and a dark-haired man came inside, impatience sparking in each and every one of his words.

"Hey, any chance you've seen a lady pass by with blue hair? Or any girl at all?"

This sounded suspicious. Already, doubts were boiling within the depths of his stomache, but his poker face remained as intact as ever. Nothing phased a Hazel. "Depends," he ventured, inwardly smirking, "if you've got a wet towel to clean up this mess."

1102 words.

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"Depends if you've got a wet towel to clean up this mess," the man said. Ulixes sneered at him. It was a practiced sneer, formulated to be as infuriating as possible without giving any onlookers the benefit of chastising him for impoliteness. It was the best way he knew to keep back any chatters he ran into along the way. Idol talk made him want to punch people.

"Sure, let me just pull out the spare damp towel I always have in my front pocket," Ulixes said. As Ulixes studied his companion, he wondered what pocket monster his DNA would fuse with easiest. He decided the man would be best as a scizor. At least, he’d be nearly as vicious as his own pocket monsters then.
He looked over his shoulder, half-expecting to see one of the stranger's rabid pocket monsters diving down at him or an enraged wild one bent on revenge for the fallen one, whose blood now splattered the walls like some stupid modern art. Ulixes thought of turning around and finding his sister on his own; his pride encouraged it. But, Reason, which didn't give a rat's rear end about his pride reminded him that he'd probably get lost again or miss his sister. With a sigh he pulled a moth-eaten tapestry from the walls. It was probably left over from the castle's glory days, when its main occupants had been two-legged. He shoved it at the boy.

"Have you seen her or not?" He was growing impatient. Didn’t this guy understand that he was so nervous and so excited to see his sister he could barely stand it, and this childish excitement made his so angered he could hardly speak? Actually, it’d be really weird if this dude knew all that; he’d have to be a mind reader or something, “because I’m in a hurry.” No, he wasn’t just in a hurry. He was late. He was sure he was late by now. Just because of this stupid castle he was stuck in. Did the architects try to make it like a maze, just to give poor saps like him headaches. He wouldn’t be surprised.

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There were perks to any job, no matter how horrible they were or how small and insignificant those perks were. This was not excluded for the job of a region-wide professor. While he could complain all day about how annoying it was having to dedicate your life to the benefit of others without getting any credit for your actions other than having a name that people knew, to have people much younger and less experienced than you knock on your door until you had a headache and opened it for them only to demand you give them something you caught, you bred, you put your time and effort into and treat you like some rotting old man all the time, that didn't mean that there were a few up sides he tended to overlook. And one of these things was that he knew people. Knew them well. He could pick apart a person just by look at their face, decipher exactly what they were feeling, or at least something pretty darn close. Close enough that he'd led others to believe him to be a mind reader at certain times. They told others not to judge a book by its cover, but when you can see every page just by looking at the bindings, who were they to complain?

So Zach knew him, this man that had so rudely interrupted his assault on the dragons of this castle. Childish impatience he'd grown so used to in young ten-year-old little boys and girls who he turned down every time because the world is a scary, scary place and it'd eat them all alive and spit them out on their parents' doorsteps and ignored when they insisted that they knew better, so much better, they're tough, they can handle it. And just like all those little boys and girls whose dreams he may or may not have temporarily crush, he would not submit to the desires of the dark-haired researcher before him. Sarcasm was a low form of wit – something that any person could wield as a deadly weapon, but not as respectable due to it's commonness in the world – easily disguised as the humor an intelligent person would use. Hence why so many people who thought themselves smart, correct or not, chose to use it so much. People even smarter than that knew how pointless it was to tell see-through lies and dropped them whole. This meant that the person he was dealing with was either a fool wearing the mask of a genius or somewhere around his level of intelligence, if he really had to guess. Maybe that was just the feel he was getting.

The stranger sneered at him in response to his half answer, half request. Flawlessly carried out. If he didn't know any better, he would have assumed that it was one of those expressions you stand in front of a mirror for fifteen minutes every day practicing if only to make sure it looks absolutely perfect. And then came that sarcasm the authoress has mentioned earlier. “Sure, let me just pull out the spare damp towel I always have in my front pocket.” Face remaining perfectly still – the expression he had stood in front of a mirror every day in order to perfect – he decided to fight fire with fire. “Good to know one of us is prepared. I'd have used mine, but I'm afraid I left that in my other suit.” With a hint of a smirk that disintegrated as soon as it had appeared, he also added, “At least that explains the wet spot on your shirt.” There was no wet spot, but it'd be amusing to watch him fumble and search for it, regardless.

The man stared at him for quite a good amount of time, trying to retrieve as much information as he could with only his eyes, if the blond had to guess. Many moments passed them by in silence, the only sound being the steadily softening sound of he and his Pokemon's breathing as adrenaline escaped all three and left soreness in its wake. After a bit, he grew tired of the quiet and chose to complain, “It's not nice to stare at people, you know?” Not long after that, his new companion cast a glance over his shoulder wearily as if expecting another attack or wondering when he could leave. Whatever the reason, it wasn't his problem. He'd prefer to be left in solitude with only his Pokemon and his enemies around him than with another human being, to be entirely honest, and he doubted any other Pocket Monsters would creep out of hiding unless he coaxed them a bit. Most were very independent of one another, and those who weren't were most likely too afraid to try their luck and end up turning into his dinner that night. Lost in his own thoughts for too long, he was snapped back to reality by a crumbling big of tapestry being tossed his way. The woven material landed on his face for a moment, he being too distracted to correctly dodge, before sliding off in an almost comical manner and floating to the floor.

“Have you seen her or not?” he snapped. “Because I'm in a hurry.”

Face twisting into his form of a scowl – eyebrows knit together at a miniscule level, corners of his mouth down turned so slightly only he would really be able to tell he was upset or angry about something – he swiped his sleeve across his face in order to get rid of some of the debris. An idiotic move on this part; all this accomplished was smearing the blood of his victory all over his face. This time, his expression contorted in blatant disgust, his indifferent facade not even really registering in his mind at the sticky feel of crimson fluids leaking down his face. “Now I really need a towel...” he muttered under his breath before his crimson eyes, hidden behind shades, focused on the person before him, face returning to normal. “So impatient. Don't even have the time to get to know the person helping you before you pester them for help.” Trying to remember if he had, in fact, seen a woman with blue locks of hair extending from his scalp and drawing a blank, he decided to lie if only to push more buttons. This is what happens when you try to get what you want right away; you only get further under the illusion you're going somewhere. “Yeah, I saw her. Was walking down that way. She's probably way deep in the castle, though. I know my way around here, so I wouldn't have any troubles hunting her down. How about you?”

1162 words.

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