"Now, if everyone did last night's assignment this question should not strain your feeble little minds: of all the Pokémon species not of the vaporous and gelatinous classifications, which possesses the second most lethal poison?"

My arm ached.

It was embarrassedly skinny, as I was, and had always been, so much smaller than the other children.

Truth be told, this one distinguishing characteristic, which might not have been that big of a deal in a normal classroom, was just the sort of thing to make me a black sheep in primary nursing school.

In this crowd of twenty-four neatly bobbie-pinned heads and looped pink curls, even an unironed dress sleeve could get one a case of no holds barred teasing for an entire day.

I raised my tiny appendage higher in the sea of arms, trying to fight on in the unspoken war.

Pick me! Pick me! My silent plea went out with wiggling fingers.

I switched to the other arm swiftly, supporting the limb with my lesser hand grasping it at the elbow.

I know I know I know I kno...

"Miss Colville?"

"Seviper!" I proclaimed.

Giggles erupted from all sides; signaling my defeat long before the teachers voice chimed in.

"No. That is incorrect. If Miss Colville had happened to read her text more carefully she would know that the Pokémon in question is..."

I felt all the blood rush to my cheeks in embarrassment as Mrs. Noble rattled of off the answer.

Of course I knew. How could I have forgotten? I pressed my nose down on the surface of my desk and groaned.

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The pressure against my nose gave two velvety taps and paused again.

Pad, pad.

"Ummm?"

Pad, pad.

Its taps persistent, this give and take ritual continued on for a good five minutes of annoyance and words on the edge of sleep.

"Aw... Mom... I don't wanna go to school! Mrs. Noble is mean.."

I mumbled, nearly turning all the way over to bury my face in the soft, cool, and very much inanimate pillow surface.
A set of claws dug lightly into my side, and a familiar meow of vengeance registered somewhere near my ear.

The flurry of cream colored fur, the shade of a stuck up billionaire movie star’s feather filled sofa throw pillows, was an all too familiar sight to me as I awoke from one reality of gashing teeth to another.

The hissing, spitting, whirlwind of annoyed, and over all most unhappy, Pokémon mass shifted its mighty twelve pound weight swiftly onto my stomach and
sent me tumbling halfway upside down over the side of the bed.

The bed... with its rose trimmed sheets... embroidered bedskirt... and battered three-year-old stuffed Goldeen comforter with all its interior filling settled to one side...

My bed... my honest-to-goodness perfectly normal somewhat boring bed!

I was home!

At least, I was in the apartment that had been my home for the last few years of my internship. Its salary was not quite enough for extreme luxury, after all.

My head still spinning, I crained to my neck upwards to lock gazes with a pair of glinting almond shaped sky blue eyes,
their pupils so dilated that the light blue made up only a rim of color around a deep sea of black.

"Good morning, Nickel," I said plainly, feeling my upper lip curl in a weak smile.

"MEOWTH, th, th, Meo!" The enraged urban cat type spat bitterly, lacing my bangs with spittle.

It felt like a hundred years since I had last been in this most ordinary environment, and I knew to Nickel the end result emotionally had been about the same for him.

Pokémon have a very different sense of time than the average human. Some studies suggest that their perception is in many ways akin to a very young human child. Whereas pleasurable events make time travel at the rate of hours a minute, distressing or painful events may seem like they take hours in the confines of a handful of minutes.

I could tell with no hesitation whatsoever that what I had here was a case of a very distressed and neglected feeling meowth.

If I Nathan’s words were true, and I really had been gone for three months, my cat was not about to let me live it down any time soon, that much I was... sure of...

I was...I was... Those two words struck a half forgotten chord somewhere deep in my mind. A memory from yesterday, or had it been longer ago still?

I flopped once more onto the bed, having just recently gathered the necessary strength to scramble back from hanging over the abyss of my bedroom carpet.

The faded blue fabric of the two sizes too big men’s long sleeve t-stirt I now found myself still wearing felt oddly comfortable as I put my arms under my head, subconsciously ringing the three inches of extra material that enveloped both of my hands between my fingers.

I was....

I was....married.

I'd always heard the human lifespan is divided into three records: birth records, marriage records, and death records. Suddenly, the prospect of having two of these said records already applying me at age twenty felt more than a bit depressing.

Of course, most people with commitment issues did not have the odd realization of being born twice...or the unique concept to deal with of not having to face mortality for a very long time.

Still, I had missed the coming-of-age ceremony this year, the only one that would ever apply to me...

I would never get the chance to wear my over flamboyant red kimono and fluffy pink boa, while getting hopelessly drunk on sake with my peers, enjoying the warm buzz of youth, not knowing what the future would bring; being united in the fellowship of acting so extremely goofy for one night in a shade of too bright red lipstick as all the authorities merely looked on...

Now, in place of my birthday celebration, I had three months that were merely a blank slate, and a vague recollection of many hours of detailed explanation told primarily by my new husband, (or should he be referred to as a 'mate'? ) who became such only by kidnapping me in the most blatant example of a worst-case scenario of internet dating I could have ever dreamed of in my former state of mind.

The cocktail of my mixed emotions ran bitter like a throbbing headache over the inside of my skull, forcing me to think less about the bigger picture of the past few days and more on the concise, less emotional, shocking details of my mates conversation...

I was... I was...

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"When you say I am ‘one of you’...that is, if I am your kind now..."

Easy, Yvonne, you can do this, concentrate on the words, I coached myself silently. Put them in the right order and just...

"What am I? What are you?"

Close enough.

The effort to speaking with any seriousness felt like it had just taken a gigantic weight off my chest.

"Well now, that is a remarkable question we don’t answer often." Nathan chuckled

"Yeah, since seven years ago more or less, " Milo added, rolling his eyes and retracting his front teeth behind their human doubles,
with a sound that brought vividly to mind a muk driving into a pool of gelatin. "But at least she was not so awfully noisy about it..."

Nathan seemed to sucessfully ignore that comment, and rubbed his head thoughtfully.

"I would guess, that your type before your hatching, the humans that is, would know our kind as the creatures commonly referred to as Vampir, or more presently, as vampires. Although other terms have been applied to our core physiolo.."

I felt various body parts I did not even know I had go numb with disbelief.

"Vampire? As...in...blood... drinking.... vampire?"

An affirmative nod, a chuckle from the nearby goliath.

"Vampires..as in..horror movie...undead..vampires?"

"I assure you, we are very much alive, and you were never before, nor will you ever be for a long time, a corpse. We do not even call ourselves by that name. It is solely a human term."

"Oh?"

"Yes. We are called Lineage. Your relatives by creation blood are your... our... "Family." Your official title is that of Mother to this family, with all those ranking below you required to address you as such. "

Milo made a face and grumbled. "I have no plans to ever be addressing her as such, Father, any more than I am ever undressing her, thank you."

Maybe if I just grinned and nodded this would all be a dream...

"But there is more, and in order to live you must learn this well, Dear Heart...There are different types of Lineage."

His eyes fixed upon me with the burning purpose that his speech seemed incapable of conveying alone.

"This may be the hardest to understand but it is essential. Milo here is of Charmander Lineage."

In the mist of these words I saw the boy get to his feet and with a swift flex of his mighty biceps and the grind of straining fabric, large copper colored wings unfurled themselves from the outline of his body. The same wings from what I supposed was only a misty hallucination hours ago, now happened to be stretched out to their full-length before me, knocking over a couple chairs with their muscular wingspan. Each wing by itself was a marvel to behold, like one half of an eccentric european-style dragon lovers self-made hang glider. But the flesh strung below the sinewy humerus and wing radius, and running down upon the thin nearly invisible two phalanx (that allowed for the wings flexible stability) was far too alive and pulsing with a bizarre mixture of tiny aquamarine colored scales, and porous lightly haired humanlike flesh, to ever be mistaken for an artificial construct.

Whatever he was, or what his people (my people?) called him, those wings could have not been merely grafted onto his body in any way I can think feasible with the considerable amount of knowledge I had obtained in my many Pokémon and human relation physical biology classes.

This couldn't be possible...

The idea of vampires existing alone was hard to grasp with a sane mind, but adding to the mix the mythical idea idea of...

Pokémon human crosses... were the stuff of fables written for toddlers... stories like...

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I can still remember my great grandmother's heavily lined face looking down at me with a bemused expression over half moon spectacles.

I was four, wearing my favorite sunflower print dress, and looking down in turn on the picture book she held with all the questioning power of a tiny ruler of my own domain of fairy tales.

"Grandmére, why did the Abra man die?"

Her voice in reply was gravelly and weighted down with a history of living I would never come to know fully.

"Sweetheart, he died because he was a lazy and wouldn’t listen to the hard-working rattata-man when he told him a long winter was coming. He had no food left to eat and starved."

"But why? Why did he have to die? Why didn't Rattata-Man share his food with him?"

"You'll understand where you're older. The world isn't really that kind to the lazy or weak, Evie. No matter how much we think it is unfair..."
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"And we.. both... are Zubat Lineage."

Nathan’s hand grasped my own, and silently, like a puzzle snapping into place at a gradual, yet reassuring, rate I knew the nature of those luminous eyes.

Purple. The natural pigment of a poison pokémon venom before being exposed to the oxygen and carbon dioxide levels outside the body...

My mind attempted to reach for logic, grasping at what a little I could draw upon something, anything...

"But..aren’t those Charizard wings?...And if he is..made by you..shouldn’t he be a Zubat lin..e..age to?"

Milo groaned and lay back down on the bed, folding his wings, now outside of their confines of fabric, into the neat triangle shape of a kite at rest.

"Oh, how I hate hatchlings so early in the evening"

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And so there it was, plain as the day light streaming through my open bedroom window.

I was a vampire, a vampire pokémorphic ish thing called a Lineage.

I raised my hand to watch the sunshine bounce off each curvature of my fingers and was greeted with no smoking, first-degree burns, or spontaneous combustion like those supernatural movies were so fond of. I checked my consciousness briefly: no urge to wear black clothing, no frightening change of taste toward listening to heavy metal music, no craving to put on three shades of non-matching dark makeup or sleep in a wooden box.

So far so good.I don’t even look very different from all I can tell, maybe...

That is when the smell finally hit me. It could not have been anything suddenly new in the last five minutes, maybe my troubles had been blocking it out on some unknown level.

Whatever the case, it happened to hit me just then with all the odorous force of a semi containing X-defend powder doing ninety on a slick winter road.

"Oh Nickel, what did you DO?"

Meowth urine has a very distinct smell. Some specialized normal type nurses often say that male Meowth have a tendency to spray furniture and carpet in cases when their owners have been absent for long periods, due to high stress levels. I'd never experienced it before now firsthand, and I had been absent for a very long time...

"Bad kitty, very bad kitty, I knew I should have gotten you fixed!"