Evolution Of Fable
By Alicorn
Chapter VI: A Forgetful Farewell, Shedding Of a Humanity

“You will be taken back to your home and given two days to get your affairs in order. After which you will return to me.”

“But why only two days? And what makes you so sure I will return?”

“Because in a few more days you will start to forget... and because there's nothing worse to our kind than being alone.”

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The kitchen floor was a battleground of culinary death. A carton of milk laced the kitchen tiles with a film of dairy based groundcover, while the innards of a container of yogurt did war with the sad remains of leftover Chinese takeout noodles. Raw egg yolks made up a bright cheerful stretcher for a lone bedraggled lettuce leaf...

This whole grisly scene, that could have made even the most hardened of master chefs wail while holding aloft their sauté pans and praying to the gods of gas heated ovens, was woven together with nearly an hour's worth of vomit.

And me, sitting right smack dab in the middle of the mess, not caring as it soaked into the seat of my Lovedisc Your Way underwear.

Blood, only blood.

Nickel had given up licking my once tear stained cheek sometime ago, and deciding one good glassy eyed response deserved another, I guess, had gone to press the activation button for the TV.

Blood, only blood.

The thought was a chant something akin to a prayer of depression, that had been running through my head for so long now there was no room for anything else... not even the cheerful pokéchow commercial that Nickel was watching, waving his tail along with the beat.

I sat, propped up against the refrigerator door, my legs pulled up towards my stomach, my hands grasping tightly the styrofoam, plastic covered container that had resulted in the scarlet smears around my mouth. The situated hole in one corner of the package of ground beef had once been small, neat, but neatness had not suited the ugly, shocking truth that I thought had been a blessing hours ago:

I had no fangs.

Countless attempts at eating the old fashion way have convinced me I wasn't intended to swallow solids or dairy.

So, here it was now the true art form of eating:

A mouthful of bloody ground meat, pressed up against the roof of my mouth, some unknown organ contained there siphoning the blood to my stomach, and who knows where else; creating an overabundance of saliva mixed with meat that spilled from the corners of my lips like a gorey waterfall.

Blood ...only blood... salty... blood...

It was nowhere near the over romanticized sweet scarlet nectar that all those first-person narrated popular horror young adult novels I had read when I was fourteen or so often harped on about for ten pages.

It tasted no different than the time I sucked my finger after getting a particularly nasty Beedrill sting during rounds... only more beefy, of course.

But then, maybe my shiny new complementary blood sucking palate had not developed fully yet. Given my lack of fangs it would come as no surprise to me...

I probably could have sat there forever in my own filth if I hadn't remembered his voice

Two days... two days.

One day was nearly done.

Why me? Why me... why would he want a no fanged, didn't even know how to feed herself good-or-nothing?

Don't you want to know? Something inside me asked

No, I don't, I'm staying right here and breaking down into a schizophrenic sobbing mess that gets locked away in a mental institution, thank you.

But what if he had a good reason for picking you... what if there is more to this vampire thing?

What, a cape and a seaside castle in the Whirl Islands?

Maybe not... but I bet everyone thinks you can't do it, whatever 'it' is...

Can't do it?

A fire of anger felt as if it had rekindled somewhere near my digesting liquid lunch.

Yes, Yvonne can't do it. She's a lost cause.

With a shouted obscenity that made Nickel jump, his tail transformed into the texture of a bottle brush, I hopped to my feet, nearly slipping over again.

“I'll show them!”

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There is a certain comforting monotony in knowing that you still have to go to the bathroom.

As I did my business and then went to go wash my hands I pondered at how much waste might in reality build up in a coffin if real-life vampires had a habit of reciting for hundreds of years in one.

If they had indeed, I mean if we had indeed been some sort of semi undead creatures, our bodies would have to have one heck of a recycling system within us for purifying an internal blood supply.

But if it was just being recycled over in other it really would be no reason to stock the living every night in an exciting way that sold-out at the box office would there?

If we had to drink so often because we lacked the ability to produce our own blood, as some stories suggested, that was a whole other can of worms.

A dried up mummified looking vampi..I mean, lineage, who had laid itself to rest more than a century ago came to mind, and I shivered slightly, glancing for the first time into the bathroom mirror.

A short startled scream escaped my lips as I looked upon my own face in the artificial light of my bathroom lamp, splashing a generous amount of water on to it and scrubbing briskly before then daring to look upward again:

The familiar stranger's oval, high cheekboned face was pale and wide-eyed, the blue of those eyes uncommonly dark compared to what I was used to, the whites bloodshot and tinted ever so lightly with pink.

A rat's nest of tangles now recited, bold as brass, between the looped sections of my mandatory nurses hairstyle, with what little that wasn’t entangled being frizzed beyond any stylish recognition. Worse than that, a good three inches of growth from my scalp now revealed my dull ever so common natural brunette hair color, shockingly out of place when put beside the baby powder pink I was so use to seeing it as for the last ten years.

Adding to this picture of blatant hygiene and health neglect, the freckles I was used to having sprinkled across my nose and cheeks by the beginning of summer were nowhere to be seen, a telltale sign of my three months of captivity with little sunlight, and to top it all off, my lips were horribly chapped, in that annoying way where a single central piece of flesh on the top lip just bagged to be peeled off with the front teeth.

“Do we have work to do...” I said with a sigh to the ever curious pokemon sitting next to my elbow.

Nickel, recognizing this sigh as being in an ‘I better make myself useful if I want to get a pork flavored poke-snack’ sort of tone, grabbed the two nearest small bottles off the medicine cabinet shelf, gripping them triumphantly in his jaws for me to take.

“Thank you Nickel.” I giggled with the half repressed grin.

As luck would have it neither bottle happened to be the one I wanted, but the little cat soon saw to remedy this, nearly emptying my whole body and hair care arsenal in his search mission of trial and error. Pokémon can’t read after all, but they are nothing if not persistent.

After deciding against the declaring war on the months worth of mildew and mold that might just as well have developed intelligent life in my shower by taking a sponge bath, I noted with a nearly morbid sense of curiosity that my body was not completely unchanged is I had once believed:

The blotchy patch of purple flesh was located matter-of-factly on top of my left breast, as if in its own silent way it had always been so fading off gradually to my normal skin pigment as it became further away from where I heart was located, the blood veins there mimicking the deep lilac ones in my neck 'wedding ring'.

My mouth feeling oddly dry again, I swallowed meekly, quickly beginning to get dressed in my favorite old hair dying outfit...

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An hour later, after wrestling with the last remaining stubborn tangle and showing it the business end of a pair scissors to seal its fate, I prepared mentally for the last remaining step.

The details of the logo art on the bottle of the Nurse Joy’ s brand ‘In The Pink’ semipermanent hair dye had never looked so very clear to me before:

The Nurse Joys picture standing beside the 'n' of the trademarked company name drew my eye, she had been the very Joy that founded the first Pokémon nursing school some fifty years ago, so the story goes. Her body was a little too perfectly slim, smile wide, and white pinafore two shades brighter than I had ever been able to get mine in reality. I tried my best to look away from that image.... that perfect mocking smile... squeezing a fifty yen coin sized amount of the dye onto the palm of my hand.

In The Pink dye always looked like the translucent icing for a five-year-old little girls birthday cake, and smelled remarkably akin to a newly opened package of bubblegum, but its sugary first impression was deceptively non-toxic. I grinded my teeth, bravely awaiting the familiar sting of the chemical concoction against my scalp, sending an involuntary shudder down to my vaseline rimmed ears.... The rest of the evening was spent sorting through my belongings and deciding which to take upon my journey.

Since the times of knights in shining armor and the Pokémon that fought beneath them as virtual war machines, a Pokémon journey has been an intricate part of a normal child's growing up and a sign of increased independence.

So much so in fact that a whole corner of the most sophisticated of written literature is dedicated just to that subject and the most talented ,and not as much so, of artist have composed songs as well.

Five or so of the less than award-winning poems and songs that we were forced to research in school now tumbled around in my mind through an annoying case of loose association. The all-time worst of these melodies of course, was the one now playing inside my head, a bright and cheerful earworm rhyme that's meter had never made much sense to me:

If I should journey in the spring,
let my pokemon be Sunflora, the flower queen.
Leafy hands to shield me at night,
shredded cheek seeds to ease my hungers plight.
Extra petals of sunlight yellow,
to sell as short-lived garlands clean
Let my friend forever be the flower queen...

But this was no normal journey.
Nathan had made it all too clear that whatever was to come would be a lengthy excursion from which there was no coming back, at least not for ten years or so.

I glanced at the picture of Mom and Daddy on my night stand, they looked so happy and blissfully unknowing of what I was about to do that my stomach clenched into an uneasy knot of regret...

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“Why ten years?” I asked naively, I felt my hands shaking as if they contained all my emotions ready to explode upward like the contents of a queasy Snorlax's stomach.

“Ten years is the minimum amount of time before a missing person is declared presumed dead, by which time they will be looking for a much older version of yourself not the young woman you will remain as you are today...”

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My hands had resumed their former queasy trembling, feeling half numb as I carefully lifted the much too small articles of clothing out of the only traveling luggage container I had ever bothered to buy for myself:

The backpack from when I was eleven years old. Funny, how I hadn't bothered to unpack it all these years...that it had been moved with all the rest of my few belongings from the nurses primary boarding school dormitories to my own independent apartment when I turned seventeen.

Sitting for months upon months, collecting a layer of dust like some forgotten teddy bear that long recalled being held tight to keep the monsters of adult dissolution at bay, in a closet of half realized dreams...

Now here I was, a twenty old year old vampire with a head of freshly bubblegum dye infused curls, tumbling freely down to where I could nearly sit upon them, (as was the required length for Joy-dom) clutching that same neon yellow backpack covered in homemade Corsola and Staryu patches cut from my favorite childhood bedsheet, sealed on clumsily around their edges with brightly colored puff paint....

It spurred something long hidden away from my every day recollections, memories from that bygone age where I actually thought that running from my parents preset expectations of me would somehow make them prouder in the long run. That I would in some magical way miraculously evolve in the light of something far removed from the world of an everyday primary nursing school.

Such a short trip, but it seemed to make sense that the time...

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“ You cut it up?” Her question was probing, with a distinct hint of I-know-better-than- to-do-that-ism.

She had been my best friend back then.

Funny, I can't even recall her name now. But her condescending tone in memory makes up for that.

"Yeah, I did. It's no big deal it was my sheet after all.."

I was walking along the dusty road in my new white sneakers, getting them blissfully dirty in the red soil that was the trademark of route twenty four, the faint padding of Nickel's kitten size feet mimicking my own path.

The girl beside me had a backpack too, much bigger than my own. Shiny leather with a sleeping bag attachment. New, custom-made, expensive. Even my memory of her smelled rich...

“Do you honestly think you can get away with this? You're half a year older than most starting trainers already. Just give it up, I would if I were you. Running away won't do any good..."

Then... that moment... that's when she stopped been my best friend, I remember now... the sting of too honest words...

"I'm not running away, I'm running to something, something important. I want to at least try, not become some silly nurse...."

And then there was the recollection of running, a bitter taste in the back of my throat, running in the opposite direction of my parents and that nameless girl who had always gotten everything she wanted upon a silver platter.

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I wonder if she ever became a Pokémon Master, or if money bought her easy fame scooped up effortlessly in what would now be her Alakazam's signature weapon...

I fell asleep to the rhythmic shadowy thoughts of running far from everything I knew, my still soggy head using the little traveling pack as a makeshift pillow, a warm feline curled up on my faintly itching hands.

From somewhere far removed from conscious thought my inner voice of truth nearly buzzed amiss striking irony.

You always wanted to go on a pokémon journey. Who would have ever guessed the pokémon in question would be yourself?

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Traveling around town as a sunglass masked, big floppy straw hat wearing, Nurse Joy makes one remarkably inconspicuous.
With most regulation uniform wearing nurses only identifiable features being upper face and eye shape, as well as length of hair loop, it turned you into a virtual clone in public.

Sometimes I got the impression in my years of being a nurse, that a Joy, wearing the appropriate oversized level of 70's style glasses and a wide rimmed sombrero, could rob the First National Bank of Pewter City with a shiny red gyarados and still be unknown in identity, and at large, years later...

I valiantly resisted this urge as I walked at a smart clip into the local banking establishment. After all, while there was no telling when or if I would come back to another official government building like this, a single meowth was hardly a pokemon meant to strike fear into the hearts of bank receptionist.

The bank tellers with a false cheerfulness to each befitting a small army of the ranks of Joydom, had long-ago in my youth been replaced by automated machinery.

“Hello, a pleasure to be of service today.”

The robotic voice of the trilling Meowth figure atop the card scanner exclaimed.

Nickel hopped up on the scanners shoulder in the next second, and as I inserted my card, he began batting at its blinking eyes as if trying to establish robotic organic Pokémon communication.

“Your balance is (Bleep) yen. What would you like to do today?” On any other day the customary beep that hit my account balance for nosy passers by would have made me laugh.
But today was not a humorous one. I hit the withdrawal button decisively with the straw liked touchpad pin.

“Withdraw? Are you certain?”

Bleep.

“It is my duty to inform you that in order to retain your account you must have a minimum balance of Ą500. Are you certain?”

Bleep!

> I was almost certain that a full half of the other customers at the bank looked across at me from their own terminal booths as my overzealous tap almost left a virtual hole in the screen.

Grinning cheerfully like a good little Joy that had just withdrawn her whole life savings for no particular non-Vampiric reason, I made a speedy retreat to the door.

Nickel was soon at my heels, with his touch pen trophy in mouth, dragging its disconnected wire tale across the glossy white entry title proudly....

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“Forget... in what way?” His tone was businesslike once more, as if reciting a well-known play from an invisible script read one too many times at the edge of sleep.

“Mild selective disassociation, think of it as a side effect of selective Alzheimer's with none of the repercussions. You will recall that you have loved ones before your hatching, details of every event just as it was. But you will no longer be able to link their memory to faces or names. In this way of half forgetting the transition to being a Lineage will be less sorrowful and less prone to acts of violent remorse. It is the price one pays for great power Dear Heart.”

In that moment for some reason I recalled vividly the many vampire movies I had had the luxury of renting in the past whose antiheroes did nothing but spread anguish about their lost mortal families while sipping cheap blood laced wine in dusty mansions.

At least I know I won’t have that future to look forward to. I thought, trying to hide utter disbelief with heavy selfishness.

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The note itself sounded just as cliché as Nathan’s speech, the cousin to many a teenager’s depressed and attention starved suicide farewells in the vast expanse of the Internet. Had circumstances been different I would have never dreamed of writing it.

Still, unoriginal or not, cringe worthy or not, it was the closest thing to the honest truth that would not result in seven-year long search parties followed shortly after by a greatly reduced lifespan on an operating table in garlic laced steal restraints.

I stole one last glance at my room from where I sat, one leg already outside my window escape route.

Everything was neat and clean as if no one had ever slept there save the note placed prominently on the end table next to a lone picture frame. The couple in the photo were smiling as if eternally in love.

I hoped that my parents were as happy as them right now, wherever they were...

Dear Mom and Daddy,
I don't know what to say or even how to say it so that the whole thing doesn't sound crazy.
I'm going away, don't try to find me, trust me it is already too late.
By the time you read this I will be gone.
It's not your fault, it's mine, and I'm sorry if I ever caused you disappointment.
Love always,
Yvonne