'Field Work'

by **gmoyes** Thu Jul 25, 2013 10:39 pm

Alex smirked as he lied in his bed with his eyes closed. Now that he had graduated from school and it was summer, he could afford to sleep in. And it allowed him more rest due to his overactive mind keeping him awake at night. Oh, the price to pay for being a young genius. With a groan, he rolled over and retrieved his laptop from his bedside table and woke it up. There were a quite a few internet pages open from researching as well as keeping tabs on some online forums. There was also a bunch of word documents from some of his past research papers as well as a couple he was currently working on. Things have been progressing much faster now that he had a Porygon to dictate for him. It was certainly handier than most other dictation programs he’s used. Half the time it ended swearing at him.

He checked for some updates on the forums. He wasn’t much of a poster, mostly a stalker reading pretty much everything. Sure he posts every once in a while to put in his two cents, but sometimes he just makes an ass out of himself. People were certainly not his thing.

And just then his door swung open to reveal the one person that he had to deal with for the majority of his life. “Get out of my room, Shrimp.”

His younger brother crossed his arms in the doorway. While ‘Shrimp’ was an old teasing name for him, he was currently a couple centimeters taller than Alex with a bizarre hair style that had him wondering if they truely were siblings. His dark hair bleached and dyed blue almost two weeks ago had faded into a motley rainbow and it was shaved short on the back and sides but was long in front and on top and came to a point that covered part of his face. ‘Dweeb’ was moving up there in the nickname frequency. “Come on, Alex. Mom said you shouldn’t lie in bed all day.”

Alex rolled his eyes. “Don’t care Dave. Get out before I call out Glitch.” The Porygon was a great tool to get rid of annoying pests. And David ranked up there as the largest pest of all. They were both on summer break while both of their parents were at work. They had managed to survive without too much fighting.

His brother stepped back out of the doorway, but still stuck his head in. “You got to get outside. You have your trainer’s license, why don’t you put it to work? You said you needed a job, get some money training.”

“Whatever. Just go. Shoo.” He waved his hand at him until he had gone. He sighed to himself. His brother was right, though he had plenty of money, much more that David did. He kept spending all of it on junk. But still, he probably should get out, maybe start doing some fieldwork.

Of course if he was going out he needed to figure out which way he was going. Mauville was pretty much the center of the region and route came out in all directions. Going east to Route 118 was out of the question, there was nothing out there but a long, wet, rough haul to Fortree. West along Route 117 would hold plenty of trainers but not much else. He could keep going to Verdanturf and past that to Rustboro. While it would be neat to visit the Devon Corp. headquarters, there wasn’t much in the lines of non-biological Pokémon out that way. North to Route 111 held Pokémon such as Baltoy and Slugma, but he would come across unforgiving desert and the active volcano. It would be tough going. So that left south to Route 110. From there he could get to New Mauville and he was sure he could find Magnemite and Voltorb in there.

With his mind made he made preparations for his trip. He got his pants on and double checked to see if his wallet and Glitch’s pokeball were in his pockets. Reassuring himself, he continued to get ready for his adventure.

---

After packing supplies and calling his mother and father to tell them where he was going, he made his way out of the city down to the south. The cycling road that led to Slateport soon came into view. He gave a little smirk to himself. If he was going to Slateport, it would be by the low road. He hadn’t ridden a bike in years, the last time he did was when his bike hit an unexpected rut and the handlebars ended up twisting around to jab him in the stomach. Well, he didn’t really need to ride a bike, he had his driver’s license.

As he approached the gate to the cycling road, he scanned the treeline along the road. He knew the path to New Mauville was somewhere along here, he just needed to find it…