Chapter 8: Awakening

"Kim's Chinatown" the sign outside of the Chinese restaurant read.

The sign was a 1.5 feet long and 10 feet wide plank with an unpainted outlining of the inner plank that showed it was made of wood and an inner area that was painted black and spelled out the letters of "Kim's Chinatown" with white paint.

The walls were made of bamboo that was separated into rows and columns, potted plants laid against the wall, and the door was a sliding wall that was currently opened with a transparent cloth covering the entrance, blowing the cloth around as the wind gusts moved it through the air.

My family and I walked through the cloth and up to the reception area, where John started to show the receptionist our reservation while Lacy and I talked.

"What do you want to do after we eat?" Lacy asked me as she looked around the restaurant, marveling at the beauty of its Chinese design.

I was similarly inspecting the Chinese style that the restaurant's interior took on, but I wasn't marveling at the designs but questioning them.

'How the hell did Chinese designs get into a Pokemon world? Where does ethnicity come from? I've seen many ethnicities so that means other races must have traveled here before to spread their cultural influences, or maybe every ethnicity originated here?' I inwardly thought before I responded to Lacy's question.

"I don't know, can't we just go home?" I answered with my signature monotone voice, which when added with my calm and tranquil expression gave me a peaceful and soothing voice that one would hear when listening to sleep meditation audios.

"Oh come on Ender, you need to go outside more. The only times you go outside is when you workout, but I don't want you going too far so you only go to the front lawn!" Lacy nagged to me, making me groan.

'What was it with mothers and nagging? Perhaps the intense desire to be a good parent makes them worry about every little thing, thus making them complain about everything that their child is doing "wrong"?'

"With that logic, I wouldn't be able to go outside if you don't want me going that far," I replied, making her eyebrows twitch.

"You know what I mean!" She said with a slight grin.

However, I knew that behind the grin was a blood-thirsty mother that would throw me off a building if I pushed her too far.

Before a new conversation topic could emerge between us, John and the receptionist finished getting his reservation confirmed and he turned around.

"Enough chit-chat, the Lord has allowed us to live yet another day and has given us the privilege of enjoying another meal. We mustn't keep him waiting!" John said to us.

"Oh yes, the heavenly lord is waiting! Whatever shall we do without him?" Lacy said in an exaggerated and dramatic tone, causing John to frown.

"Don't disrespect the lord like that woman," John said before following after the receptionist.

Lacy sighed, and mumbled to me; "What's with him? He is becoming more and more fanatic about that new religion that is spreading throughout the town. He wasn't like this before…"

I also sighed, because I had no idea how to help their marriage. Lacy was a kind woman who showed a fiery and confident personality on the outside, yet had a caring and compassionate one on the inside. She was an amazing cook, she cleaned the house, and she made a decent amount of money by creating her own business styled around beauty products.

Meanwhile, my father was a strict man who owned a successful business that made him one of the wealthiest people in the town. I had been told by Lacy that he used to be a sweetheart who was always smiling, yet one day he had started talking about some weird religion that he was extremely invested in.

At first, it was tolerable, and he seemed to only show some interest in the religion. But as the days went by, he started to follow the religion and grow more fanatical each and every day where to the point it was affecting their marriage.

"When did John start changing?" I asked Lucy inquisitively, my suspicions about what was up with him and his odd religion flaring. I had long suspected something fishy about John's religion just from the small fragments of information I received by listening in on their conversations, but his behavior was becoming increasingly worrying.

He even said "Don't disrespect the lord like that woman," to his own wife! That may seem like a small insult, but it shows contempt for Luna and her words; one of the symptoms of the disease named domestic abuse."

"It was about four years ago, in those times we used to be so happy together. We dreamed of having many children, living in a nice house, and dying old by each other's side. But ever since that religion of his entered his life he changed so much," She responded, believing my questions to merely be out of curiosity and not suspicion.

'If it started four years ago then it was two years before my birth. I wonder what sort of cult could change a man so drastically in just four years?'

"What is the religion that John follows called?" I asked.

"Hm… I don't think he has ever told me the name of his religion, but I did spot him praying in our room to the "lord," and only one name came up. I couldn't hear it clearly, but I'm pretty sure it was something like Begeedem," Lucy answered me.

'Wait… that name sounds familiar.'

"Why? What's with the sudden curiosity?" Lucy asked me questioningly.

I opened my mouth to respond, but the receptionist stopped in front of a table and we stopped walking to take our seats around the table.

"A waiter will come to take your orders soon. In the meantime, you can read our menu and find what you want to eat!" The receptionist said in the signature professional tone that all employees have.

After saying that line that she had probably repeated ten thousand times to thousands of customers, the receptionist left our table to go back to her desk.

"Order however much food you want Ender, its an amazing day to celebrate! The Lord has granted you life for yet another year!" `John said fanatically, causing a slight grimace to appear on my face for a split second before I replaced it with a smile.

"Thanks, John, I thank the lord that I can live another year!" I said in a similar tone, causing a questioning expression to appear on Lucy and an ecstatic one on John.

"So you've finally reverted to praising the Lord! What made you change to the lord?" John asked me.

"Well, I saw how you changed for the better ever since you met the lord. But I've personally never seen him before, have you?" I asked him.

"Actually, I have! Why don't I tell you about his greatness? It all started when…" John started to say, as he started to tell many tales about how great the Lord is and how he would have died if he didn't have the lord by his side.

From the many stories, he told me I found that for some reason this "lord" would always help him at a critical moment, and without the lord, he would have failed many things. He even attributed his business success to the lord, as he says he remembers the lord giving him a dream about what steps to take to become successful.

The dreams sounded like nonsensical stories you would find in most religious texts, and I didn't believe a single word coming out of his mouth. At least religions admit that their stories are made up to teach their believers how to act and give them a guideline on their morals, and not meant believers take the stories as being real. But it seems that John truly believes that the lord had a significant impact on his life!

Throughout our meal, John constantly rambled on about how great the lord was, and towards the ending of our meal, I started to feel a slight pain in my eye.

'Perhaps it's because of the large amount of bullshit that John is spouting that my eye started burning?' I thought to myself.

Soon, we finished eating and John stopped talking. The food was delicious and tasted just like the Chinese food from Earth, and in the end, the check was 210 Pokebucks.

We left the restaurant and got back into the car to drive back home, my eye burning and the pain accumulating for every second that passed. I tried my best to ignore the pain through the car ride because I thought that eventually, the pain would pass, but even when we made it to the front of our house and parked in the lane the pain only got worse.

John opened the garage and we all got out of the truck to go back inside the house, but as we were walking through the garage the pain reached a boiling point and I fell to my knees.

"Ender?!" Lucy cried out as she ran up to me in a panic.

I had my hand clutching my eye and my head to the floor, the pain making me go crazy.

"AGH!!" I yelled out to try and relieve the pain to no avail.

John also ran up to me and started murmuring prayers for the lord to help me, causing a vein to bulge on Lucy's head.

"You fucking idiot, stop praying and carry him inside!" Lucy yelled at him.

"It's never a bad time to pray! The lord will help him!" He screamed crazedly. The words made Lucy's anger soar, and she slapped John across the face.

The slap shocked John, but it also brought him out of his fanatical craze.

He directly picked me up and hurriedly brought me into the house before laying me down on the couch.

"What's wrong Ender?" John asked me in a worried tone. Perhaps if I was focused I would have been surprised by the change of personality, but I currently felt like somebody was shoving a molten hot rod inside of my eyeballs and twisting it around.

"Eye! My eye burns!" I yelled loudly in-between my painful shouts.

Hearing my words, John grabbed my hand and pulled it away from my eye before pulling my eyelid open to see that my irises had turned into a blood-red color.

Something about the color seemed to spark something in him, and he seemed to be in a daze. He started walking back towards the kitchen with slowly and clumsy steps, his eyes unfocused and his body twitching.

"John?" Lucy called him with concern.

To her shock, John grabbed a kitchen knife and turned back to them with a frenzied look in his eyes.

"Demon! You must have been possessed by a demon! The lord rejected your prayers in the restaurant because you are possessed by a demon, and as his follower, I must vanquish you!" John screamed before he started running at us.

"No John! Please, stop!" Lucy screamed in a panic as she stood in-between me and him.

"You have been charmed by the demon! Die!" John said as he raised his knife while maintaining his sprint, causing the color on Lucy's face to drain.

When John reached a suitable distance to attack, he brought his knife down and stabbed it towards Lucy's body.

Lucy clumsily attempted to grab John's wrist and push him away, but grabbing a moving wrist was much harder than it looked like in the movies; especially when that wrist wielded a knife. How could an untrained woman possibly achieve that?

The knife plunged into Lucy's chest, penetrating deep into her heart. He twisted his knife around the insides of her heart, completely getting rid of any hope left of healing her. Even the futuristic technology of this world; compared to earth-- couldn't heal a heart that was so badly injured. Perhaps only the magical Pokemon could possibly heal her from that.

Sadly, no healing Pokemon were near.

Lucy's expression was full of shock as her hands clutched onto John's wrist; the wrist holding the knife that was plunged into her heart. Meanwhile, John's expression was fanatical and cruel, but deep in his eyes was a hidden emotion of loss that nobody would ever come to see.

I stared at the event in shock, my one good eye allowing me to see my own mother be stabbed through the heart by my father.

Shock, sorrow, disbelief, and rage all filled my expression as I stared at the two of them.

Lucy fell to her knees, tears coming from her eyes like a stream. John ruthlessly gripped his knife and pulled it out of her chest, causing her body to fall to the ground.

After that, he turned his eyes to me.

'How? How could this happen? Why did his fanaticism rise to a level that made him crazy so suddenly, and how could that fanaticism rise over the love he had for his own wife?' I thought as I watched John walk over to me. His eyes were filled with madness and the blood of his own wife stained his clothes, but his gait was still steady.

"Why… why did you kill her?" I said hollowly, my tone weak and filled with no energy. The pain of the odd pain of my searing eye had drained me of my vitality, and I had no energy to move a limb.

A crazed grin appeared on John's face as a maddened glint flashed in his eye.

"Because she was charmed by the likes of you, demon! You will follow her soul to hell!"