"I see... so everything was just an accident?" Officer Jenny from Dustia City asked.
"It seems so," the warden from the museum nodded. "The wires holding the mummy in place were kinda old, and when the mummy toppled over... its lance broke the show case it was standing in. Its bronze tip may be old, but it's still sharp and solid."
The curator didn't look happy about these turns of events at all. "Are you sure, Moe?" he asked his warden. "You know we always use the finest materials when putting up our exhibits and I..."
"What I mean to say is..." the warden added as he looked grimly at the curator. "That we should have paid a lot more attention on safety of our exhibits, Charles!"
Officer Jenny. "It is alright, Mr. Dugit. Just make sure that it doesn't happen again. Well, and in regards to you kids... I can see that you were just at the wrong place at the wrong time."
"Um, that's... too generous, Officer Jenny..." Ash stuttered. He was still dazed by what happened. May and Pikachu didn't look any better.
Brock, on the other hand, gave the policewoman a grin and chuckled: "Oh, I know she is generous! As much as she is beautiful and smart and beautiful and did I mention beautiful...?"
Max grabbed Brock's ear and dragged him away. "Let's take you back to the Pokémon Center before you say anything stupid and she keeps us here after all..."
"Owowow!" Brock yelped. "Let go, she and me are meant to be..."
May sweatdropped. "He never learns, does he?"
Pikachu shook his head. "Pika pi!"
Later in the evening, they were spending the night in the Pokémon Center's guest rooms.
Ash looked over at his room mates and blinked. "Sooo... did anyone else notice something weird when that mummy broke out of its display case?"
"You mean like moving on its own?" May giggled nervously. "Nope, can't say I've seen anything like it..."
"But you were standing practically in front of it," Brock said. "Wasn't that the reason you jumped back and... ouch!" He rubbed his shin were Max had kicked him. "What was that for?"
Max glared at Brock intently. "We never saw anything, we never heard anything, we never knew anything of mummies that suddenly come to life. Right?"
"Uh, what do you mean...?"
"RIGHT?" Max asked again.
This time, Brock got it. "OH! Oh, of course... no, we never saw anything like that."
"Yeah..." Ash chuckled. "I mean, it would be pretty weird if something like that happened, right? But imagine, everyone we would tell about it would believe we were kinda cuckoo in the head... Nope, we definitely don't want that..."
May yawned. "Well, I don't know about you, but I'm tired. See ya in the morning... g'night..."
But still as Ash was lying in his bed, he couldn't shake the memory of the mummy pulling on its wires, clearly intent on breaking free of its prison.
Pikachu looked at him in worry. "Pika pika?"
"I can't quite sleep, Pikachu. I mean, we all knew what happened. But isn't that supposed to be impossible?"
Pikachu tilted his head. "Pi?"
Ash chuckled. "Yeah, I guess we saw many weird stuff on our journeys... remember how we stood at that harbor and never realized how or why we got there? Or even better, when we helped Lugia near Shamouti Island? Man, those were crazy times..."
Pikachu nodded. "Pika Pikachu!"
He frowned. "But still... we know that Pokémon can become Ghost Pokémon after they die. What if... what if the same thing can happen to humans as well? Only that this wouldn't be a ghost, but a moving... well, a moving mummy." He shivered. Greg was right, he didn't want to meet such a guy in the dark.
"We really should try to get some sleep before my pondering will give me nightmares," he muttered. "Night, Pikachu..."
"Pika..."
The next morning, the four friends all acted as if nothing special had happened the day before. But Ash still couldn't stop thinking about it...
He only got pulled out of his thoughts when they reached the lobby, and Nurse Joy looked up from her conversation with a middle-aged man with dark skin and a sparse tuft of hair on his head.
"Ash, there you are! This gentleman has just been asking for you. You know Mr. Petach?"
The name sounded familiar, and then Ash remembered that he had met the man once, he was a colleague of his father. Still he wondered what the heck Petach was doing here.
Mr. Petach turned around and looked at Ash with a smile. "Ash, nice to see you again! It has been some time, has it?"
"Um, yeah, I think so... Guys, this is Mr. Petach, a colleague of my Dad. Mr. Petach, these are my friends Brock, May and Max."
"Pika pika!"
"Oh, and my best buddy Pikachu, of course!"
"Ah, I see!" Petach smiled. "So this is your first Pokémon, the one your mother has told me so much about. How are you, my friend?" And he extended his hand to scratch Pikachu behind his ears.
Normally, Pikachu was kinda suspicious towards strangers, but this time, he let it happen. "Pikaaa..." he purred.
"Uh, I don't want to sound rude, Mr. Petach, but... what exactly are you doing here?"
"Oh, of course, you wouldn't know!" Petach laughed bashfully. "You see, I came here to bring you back home to Pallet Town."
"Home?" Ash asked in surprise. He always liked coming back home to his Mom, but... "Why now?"
"You see, your father finally found some time to visit you and your mother in Pallet, so I thought you might want to see him too. I just happened to be close by, so I figured: Why not just take you along for the ride?"
"But how did you know Ash was spending the night here?" May asked.
Petach smiled. "It's not too hard to figure out. This is the only Pokémon Center in town, and I guessed that Ash, being a Pokémon Trainer and all, would stay in a Pokémon Center for the night, not in a hotel."
"That makes sense!" Brock nodded.
Ash thought about it. It was tempting. He hadn't seen his father for almost two years. His work as an engineer rarely allowed it to come home. He was working for a big company who often sold high tech equipment for construction companies all over the world.
"What about the Hoenn League?" he finally asked. "I still have to collect several badges before I can attend."
"That would be no problem at all," Petach smiled. "Your father only has enough time to stay over the weekend, and I can always take you back in my car when the weekend is over. How does that sound?"
Ash turned to his pals. "What do you say, guys?"
Brock grinned. "Well, you know I like your Mom's cooking..."
"A short break wouldn't hurt," May shrugged.
"Sure, why not?" Max asked.
"Pika pika!" Pikachu agreed enthusiastically.
Ash turned back to Petach and nodded. "Okay, sure! I can't wait to see Dad again..."
On their way to the ferry that was supposed to bring them to Vermilion City, Ash remembered something else about Mr. Petach he had forgotten.
Petach was a reeeaaaal slow driver.
Max shuffled around on the back seat while they drove along. He had counted nearly 20 cars that had overtaken them since they left Dustia City.
"Why are you driving so slowly?" he finally asked.
Petach looked at him in the mirror, surprised. "But this isn't slow at all."
"Yes, it is," Max protested. "Don't you see that everyone is driving past us? We're barely going 70 kilometers per hour!"
Petach frowned. "This is fast enough. Have you ever realized just how fast that is?"
Ash groaned. That discussion could go on endlessly. Petach was just one of those men who was very old-fashioned about certain things, including fast cars.
May didn't seem to happy either when they drove along a bumpy country road. "How long do we have to endure this torture?" she whined. "If you had taken the freeway, we would have already reached the ferry."
Petach looked as if he wanted to say something else, but suddenly, they could hear a loud bang, and the car swerved to the right. May and Max let out a surprised scream. Petach turned around the steering wheel frantically and just barely avoided driving into a tree. He still managed to get the car back under control, but the sound of the flapping tire told them that they had a puncture.
He stopped the car, pulled the hand brake and sighed. He looked at Max and May with raised eyebrows. "See, if I had driven faster, we would have hit that tree."
"I'll never say anything against slow driving again..." May muttered. "Never again in my life..."
They got out of the car and Petach looked at the tire. "This doesn't look good," he murmured. "Good thing I have a spare tire in my trunk."
"You have to put up the warning signal," Brock pointed out. "We are directly behind a turn, and whoever would come past here wouldn't see us, because of those bushes over there."
Petach grimaced, but had to admit that Brock was right. He took the warning sign out of his trunk and looked at them sternly. "You wait here, I'll be right back. But stay at the car!" And then he walked around the street and vanished behind the bushes.
"Where should we go anyway?" Max huffed. He didn't like the man one bit.
"Let's just hope we manage to get to Pallet Town in one piece," May sighed.
Brock looked up at the sky. "It's already getting dark," he noticed. "We won't be able to reach Pallet before nightfall. I guess we must spend the night on the ferry."
"I don't understand that guy," May said. "He almost sounded as if we were in danger. There aren't any wild Pokémon around here that our own Pokémon can't take on."
"True, but maybe he..." Ash interrupted himself in mid-sentence. "What...?"
"What's wrong, Ash?" Brock asked.
Ash frowned. "I thought I just saw something over there..."
They looked over to the other side of the street... and got startled when they heard a rustling among the bushes. Max gulped. He hoped his sister was right when she said the Pokémon around here were harmless...
And then the bushes parted and a colossal, four-legged creature stepped onto the road.
Ash gasped. "What... what is that thing?" He couldn't see it clearly, but he had the image of a giant beast with sharp claws, billowy wings and a muzzle full of sharp teeth.
And it didn't look friendly.
He reached for a Pokéball. "Torkoal, I choose y..."
"RROOOOOOAAAAAARRRR..." the beast growled, and its voice alone startled the four youngsters and the electric Pokémon so much that they yelled in fright and started running towards the forest that was behind them.
Ash barely noticed what happened to the others, he only concentrated on getting away from this horrifying monster and on running around all those trees, bushes and branches. He could see Pikachu running right behind him.
A tiny part of his brain tried to tell him that this Pokémon might just have used the attack Roar to scare them away, but his legs wouldn't listen for some reason.
He heard Max's sharp yell and gasped as he imagined whatever the creature could be doing to his friends.
He forced his heart to listen to his brain and stopped. "All right, Pikachu, monster or not, but we won't let this thing do with our friends whatever it wants, right?"
"Pika!" Pikachu said with a firm nod.
Together, they ran through the dark woods towards the place where they heard Max's voice... and while they were running, Ash couldn't shake the feeling that he had seen such a monster before...
His thoughts went back to the Egypt exhibition and to the pictures of the gods and mythical creatures that were visible on the vases and urns...
Didn't it look somewhat like a sphinx? That mythical creature with the body of a lion, the wings of an eagle and the face of a human?
Ash shook his head. He had to concentrate on a battle, not on some weird nonsense his imagination was feeding him.
Through the trees, he could see a dark shape. He snarled. "All right, monster, I don't know what you are, but I won't let you harm Max. GET HIM, PIKACHU!"
"PIKA!!"
And together, they pounced on the dark figure in front of them.
"GAH!" May yelped as Ash and Pikachu came jumping out of the thicket and pushed her to the ground. "Ash, what's the big idea?"
"M-may?" Ash stuttered. "What... what are you doing?"
May grimaced. "I was trying to find my brother after I heard his yell. But then you two appeared and pushed me down to the ground. Can you finally get up, you're kinda heavy!"
"But if you are here, where is that monster?" Ash asked.
Pikachu raised a paw and gestured at a point behind them. "P-pika pi..."
Ash slowly turned around his head... and saw the horrifying face of the creature, as it stood directly in front of them.
"Rrrrrrraaaaaahhhh!"
Ash gulped. "Oh, this doesn't look good..."
See other episodes by Shritistrang
(Posted Fri, 20 Jul 2007 19:08)
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