A/N: Welcome people, to my second Pokemon story! I haven't written one of these for a while, and that was a oneshot anyway. But as regular readers of my story will already know, sometimes I get these inspirations that I just have to write, and this is one of them.

As usual of course, I don't own Pokemon and such. Additionally, this is *not* a Mystery Dungeon like story. It is not even inspired by Mystery Dungeon. Well, alright. Maybe a tiny little bit. I can understand why people would think it is once you get to the second chapter, but it isn't.

Lastly, with the exception of this prologue chapter and maybe if I use them any interludes, the story is written in a first-person, as it happens right now, present tense view. This is not something I've tried before, and I've already found it to be more challenging. But I have ideas that might work better with it, so I'm sticking with it.

And now, with that... read on and enjoy, dear readers!

I hate the voices in my head. They've been there forever, but not all the time – if that makes any sense. Sometimes they're there and I hear these random, disconnected phrases, as if I'm hearing fragments of people talking. Sometimes they're not, and those times can be short or long. They come to me even if I'm sleeping.

Stay in the grass...

...not common around here...

...strangers stick out.

Sometimes they sound like they make sense on their own, but each one is a different voice. Some of them sound threatening, others seem to be warning me. But only rarely is there a friendly voice. The rest of the time they're always like this.

Not safe for you here...

...don't trust you...

...leave us alone.

They make it sound like I'm some kind of stranger, some unique... thing. Like I'm not even human, like I'm some alien creature. They're afraid of me sometimes, but sometimes they understand, like when they're warning me. Other times they just don't want to know, when they're talking about staying away.

Not like us...

...stay away from him...

...protect ourselves.

The friendly voice doesn't make himself known often. I don't think the voices are even aware of each other. They could be from anyone, anywhere. He doesn't say much or often, but when he does...

Always be friends...

...your friends too...

...won't be alone.

...his words, his voice is always different. But I've come to accept that they're just voices in my head. As he says, I don't let it bother me. I don't know where the voices come from or why I hear them, but I know I always have a friend in him.

At least... all that... it's what I used to think. Miracles happen. Sometimes they don't look like miracles until you look a little closer. Sometimes, one person's miracle can be another's curse. But a curse is a miracle too – it's something miraculous, but not necessarily good. But they do happen.

And one day... I had a miracle. Of course, there was a lot of shock and terror involved, but there were also good times, fun times, times I never wanted to end. I had a lot of bad times too, especially near the start just after it happened, but things changed, and I learned to treasure the good times and use them to keep me going through the bad times.

Oh, right. I should tell you who I am, shouldn't I? Or should that be, who I used to be? I still have a bit of trouble with it. See before my own miracle, and to most of my friends afterwards, I'm Alex, short for Alexander Nanaky – yeah, I know. Weird name. It's not like I got to pick it. I also used to be a fairly normal, every-day college student, as long as you didn't notice that I grew up in an orphanage and largely spent most of my life on my own once I was old enough to take care of myself.

I didn't stand out much, I didn't have many friends, I kept to myself, and my grades were at best, average. I was about as invisible as it was possible to be. I used to take to wandering around a lot, largely because I didn't have anything else to do. Being on my own often meant I didn't have much to spend on anything, and if I did get something, it had to be something that would last or something I absolutely needed. I had to be practical about it, because I could never be sure when I might need the money for something more important.

When I left college, that turned out to be more important than ever. Work was hard to find. Too many places preferred hiring foreigners that could barely speak a whole sentence in our language, simply because they could be paid less. Other jobs always required some kind of certification or card that was too far out of my reach to afford. Then there's the other category of jobs – the ones that you have to have experience for. I used to wonder about those. How are you supposed to get the experience to get the job, if you need to have the job to get the experience? How does anyone even get into those kind of jobs?

After a while the local council stopped paying me benefits because they refused to believe I was actually trying to find work. It didn't really matter what I tried, all I got was a glaring silence, and once in a while a canned rejection – you know the kind, the letters which are all written in advance as 'Dear Insert Name Here'. Doesn't do wonders for your self-esteem, let me tell you.

I know I'm summarising a lot here. I don't want to bore you with the details of my life before the miracle happened to me, because there's really nothing to it but a lot of unfortunate stuff. It helps to understand though.

After a bit of this I just lost heart and didn't see the point in carrying on. Oh don't look at me like that, I didn't mean suicide – not that I hadn't thought of it once or twice. Up until then I always had hope that something would happen, but faced with the last of my savings running out and as a result, looking at losing my home, I gave up.

I've never been a religious person. I couldn't even tell you what the difference was between one religion and another. But for the first time, on the last night I knew I was going to have a roof over my head, I prayed. I prayed that someone would hear, that someone would answer and something would happen.

I prayed for a miracle, despite knowing that this sort of thing just doesn't happen. That, of course, was before the miracle actually happened.

I should explain something at this point. I always knew that Pokémon was a game, an anime, one based on the other – I could never remember which. It was something I'd never played or watched. It was something that didn't exist except as a figment of someone's imagination.

Boy was I wrong, and wrong in a big way.

The last thing I remember was simply going to sleep, the same as I'd always done. Not expecting an answer or anything to happen. Just expecting to wake up as usual.

Well. I suppose I woke up, at least. I just didn't get the rest of it.