2024-01-06: Disconnect
- Cutscene: Disconnect
- Cast: Arisugawa Joy
- Where: PEACE LAB
- Date: 6th January 2024
- Summary: Joy returns after meeting the Visitors and having a frustrating talk with Professor Oak and Mayor Nall.
Arisugawa Joy arrived back late at the pad that she, Peace and Damian had been using for a hideout. It wasn't much of a place -- cramped, as Peace put it -- but any place where she could sleep was enough for her. Her body felt heavy as lead as she collapsed onto the bed and rolled onto her back, one arm over her forehead.
Nothing's changed.
Some part of her hoped something would change, if she got to talk to Nedian leadership. She was convinced that now that she was older, she was able to get her point across better. She was being honest. She wasn't lying, or being confusing about it. Why does no one understand, still?
If this is where your journey led you...
There was no choice. People still framed it for her as a choice. There was no choice. She tried to explain that as much as she could, but no one understood. Not the senior nurses at the nursing school, not the teachers at Celadon High, not her peers in class 1-C, nor the guidance counselors she was sent to meet... and especially not the zaibatsu representatives.
When Joy was younger, she thought that the confusion and mishaps she caused by her youth and inexperience would be fixed when she became older, more mature. She thought that, with her psychic powers, she would be able to usher in a place where she could have no misunderstandings with people, be able to communicate with them clearly.
She remembered, as early as five years old, when she thought that listening to someone's heart would make them happier.
It didn't happen.
...
"Why do you lie to mom, dad?" Joy remembers asking her father.
Her father, who was reading a rolled-up newspaper at the couch, stared at her for three seconds. The withered expression on his face, which was always there, became even more tired. He blinked and tried a forced smile. "What do you mean, dear?"
"When you said you loved her..." Joy responds, quietly. "Your heart was saying something else."
The man instantly looked like he'd put ten years of age on; with stiff, withered shoulders, he knelt in front of her girl and pat her on the head.
"You're just too smart, dear," he tries to reassure her. Joy, however, was not gazing at his eyes. She was gazing at his heart. And it was full of fear of her.
"Listen, people will be upset if you tell them what's in their heart, so be careful with it, okay?"
...
People were full of contradictions. They lie so breathlessly, for one reason or another, telling harmless little white lies, and larger ones still to fit into a society; it's impossible to avoid conflict like that.
Telling them what was in their heart was bad. So should she lie, instead? No, that didn't work either... in Celadon High, when some peers tried to get close to her by asking what music she liked, she saw the scorn in her heart when she said the wrong answer.
"Oh... Trick Room? That's cool, I guess."
The girl's heart twisted inside. Trick Room? Only old people listen to that. Everyone's more into Arcmene Aggravation or Exploud Enough these days.
The next time, with a different group of people, she peeked into what she thought the 'right' answer was, and they were creeped out by how she could figure out what they were thinking instead.
The same thing happened with adults, too. At one point, she was suspected of cheating on her midterms. She was referred to a psychic counselor from Saffron. The zaibatsu sent a representative to warn her about standing out in a negative fashion.
The 'wrong' answer made people unhappy, and the 'right' answer made people unhappy as well. The more she tried, the more she listened to people's hearts, the more confused and lost she became.
The older she grew, as she moved through secondary school and started high school, the more she sensed the capricious nature of people's hearts. At that point, she resolved...
I don't understand people's hearts... so I won't listen to them any longer.
...
Joy didn't have many Pokemon that can be considered 'cuddly' -- she thought that it was selfish to just have a Pokemon that was cuddly just to hug them when she needed it -- but now she's starting to understand why people might have such a companion, why Damian has his Purrloin, why Peace has her Eevees.
But... right now...
She rises from her bed and walks outside, into the crisp night air outside of Peace's laboratory.
"... come," she calls, as she pops a Pokeball. Out emerges the creature who, unlike its Trainer, understood well the cycle of suffering and release; a creature that had long transcended the trappings of desire and the ways in which one becomes fettered such. A creature who dreams beyond dreams.
Joy looks left and right to make sure no one's looking and...
... clambers ontop of her Snorlax and sinks into its belly, and closes her eyes and drifts off to dreamless sleep.
"You're so much wiser than I am, Snorlax."