The night following the day I played that weird game, my four cats were going crazy, like they do just when you don’t want them to. In the end, they managed to get out of the back door. I’ve always thought, we need a cat flap, but apparently the doors are incompatible. Anyway, the cats were out all night, and slowly, one by one, they came back in, reluctantly, in the morning- Moe, then Bonny, followed by Stanley, and, at last, after a long wait, Kira. I proceeded to get ready for school.
That day, at school, the usual Thursday morning year group assembly was cancelled, and replaced with a full school assembly. The headmaster, who had joined the school not two years previously, towards the end of when I was in Year 9, was slightly pale, and he told us that one of the Year 10s had died. Big deal, I thought to myself- cruel, I know, but everyone in that Year 10- and all those in the year beneath me since I was in Year 7- had been pests and nuisances, and I wouldn’t have cared more then than I did now. So sue me.
I wasn’t listening until I heard the headmaster say something that piqued my curiosity- as I said, his ICT class had been at the local TV centre. According to this recount, he had not had time to return to his school uniform, so the coach that took his class there took him straight back to the town he lived in- still in those actress’ clothes. When he got off the bus, his mother phoned him, telling him to hurry home- as she had won the full National Lottery jackpot! After this, he had apparently come across some Chinese lucky coins, and kept them.
Sadly, the headmaster concluded, in spite of the lucky coins and the lottery win, he had been assaulted by a stray cat on the way home. He had tried to get it to move aside, but it attacked him.
And scratched him.
The wound turned septic, and he died.
DNA samples proved the cat to be my Kira. She was Paul’s murderous ‘K’.
When I got home, I found no trace of that Diamond cartridge, just the one I called my own. I had last saved the game in Sunyshore City myself (and I had been one who gave the characters off-the-wall names). On the trail of Cresselia, Cindy (my character) went west to look for the elusive Pokémon. What I/she found was a roadblock. There was a dead body of a female character lying dead in the road. I tried on Pearl, and Cedric (my Pearl character) found the same roadblock. I downloaded a fresh copy of Platinum off the internet, and I selected ‘New Game’, only for a text box to tell me that:
‘You cannot start a new game until they bury Paul!’
At school, the next week, there was a follow-up assembly in which we were told Paul had had his funeral, was cremated, and had his ashes buried.
That night, the roadblock was gone. So was Kira. We never found her.
