(OOC: Finally moving this out of Lyle's journal so I can edit the journal to add stuff.)

His mom said they were useless rocks. His big bro and sis said they were pretty enough, but not worth anything. The librarian who helped him look them up said they were probably quartz, which wasn't worth much unless it was really pretty. But maybe they were wrong! They might be diamonds like he first thought, but maybe the pretty rocks he found were actually be some kind of valuable gem!

So every chance he could, (when he didn't want to go swimming instead, or play tag with the neighborhood kids, or play with his neighbor's Poochyena, or...) Lyle would go out to the rocky ditch a little ways into the Pilkiras Plains where he'd found the shiny whitish stones and dig more up. Some where crystals, some where clearish, some were tinted a little pink, but most where just a frosty whitish stone that glinted in the sunlight. He'd dig up the prettiest ones he found and stick them in a bucket to take home and wash off. The clearest, most crystal-y ones he put on the windowsill of the bedroom he shared with his big bro, so they could catch the light and sometimes make little rainbows on the walls.

He was sitting in the ditch and digging for stones one day when he saw it. A purplish spotted shape, low to the ground and creeping along the bottom of the ditch, occasionally scratching along the walls for something. Then it picked up something from the ground, opened its mouth to reveal wickedly sharp teeth, and bit into the something with an incredibly loud CRUNCH!

Lyle didn't scream at it. He would never do that, people would laugh at him if he did. But he did kind of yelp a little and scrabble away, which caught the thing's attention. It turned sharply towards him, staring at him with odd eyes that glinted in the light like polished stones. It was hard not to yelp again at that eerie gaze, so Lyle did what seemed the next best thing: he picked up whatever was closest at hand, which happened to be one of his shiny stones, and threw it at the purple thing.

It didn't hit, and the thing didn't run away. Instead it perked up and leaped towards the rock catching it in its mouth like a dog catching a treat. It chomped for a bit, making more of those weirdly loud CRUNCHing sounds, then apparently swallowed. And looked at Lyle expectantly.

The boy just kind of started at the purple thing. Finally he said, "Did...did you just eat that rock?" And the thing nodded. Another surprise; he hadn't really been expecting an answer. "You can understand me?" he asked. Another nod. Huh. Wierd thing that looked like nothing he'd ever seen, and could understand what he said..."You must be a pokemon, then!" he concluded excitedly.

"Sableye!" answered the pokemon, just as happily.

"Sableye, huh?" Lyle repeated. "That must be the kind of pokemon you are." This got another cry of "Sable!" from the pokemon, who was starting to inch towards the pile of rocks Lyle had dug up that day. "Hey!" Lyle said when he noticed. "Those are mine! I worked hard to dig them up!" And he scooched between the rocks and the Sableye.

In return, the pokemon gave him a look that, despite having oddly glassy eyes (they kind of looked like gems, now that Lyle thought about it), managed to remind him of his neighbor's Poocheya begging for a treat. It was actually kind of cute.

"Well...OK, just one more," he said, relenting. He picked another chunk of shiny rock and tossed it at the Sableye. Again the pokemon jumped into the air to catch the rock in its mouth, followed by happy crunching. Lyle grinned. "You're pretty good at that. I wonder if I can make you miss one." The Sableye perked up, grinned and hopped up an down, clearly eager to take the challenge. "OK, here we go!" Lyle said, gathering up a large handful of shiny pebbles.

They spend quite a while on that strange game of Catch the Pebble. The Sableye proved to be very nimble, bouncing off the walls of the ditch to make quick turns, and jumping quite high to catch pebbles that Lyle had thought would go over its head. By the time Lyle had finally managed to get one past it, he'd almost gone through all the rocks he'd dug up that day and it was just about lunchtime.

"That was a lot of fun!" Lyle told the pokemon, grinning as widely as it was. "But I need to go home now for lunch. Bye!" He gathered up the few rocks he had left (he'd saved the biggest and prettiest for last) tossed them in his bucket and carried that off towards home. But when he glanced back one more time, he found the Sableye following him. "Hey, no more food today. I need to get food for myself now. Aren't you full, anyway?" The Sableye shook his head and kept following.

Lyle was about to protest again when a thought occurred. "Hey! You want to be my pokemon? I've got more rocks at home to feed you, and we can dig up more together!" The Sableye cocked its head and appeared to be considering the offer. It took so long that he was afraid it was going to refuse, but eventually it grinned again and nodded. Then leaped at him. Lyle started to stumble backwards, but the pokemon still landed on his shoulder, where it perched like a really weird parrot and sort of nuzzled Lyle's cheek. Lyle laughed and scratched it on the head. "Great! ...Now I just have to convince Mom to let me keep you." He considered this problem all the way home.

Almost as soon as he got inside his family's apartment, his mom noticed the Sableye on his shoulder. Before she could protest Lyle burst out, "It's a pokemon and it followed me home! Can I keep it?"

His mom sighed. "Lyle, we can't afford a pokemon. We don't have money to feed pets--"

"That's OK!" he interrupted. "This one eats rocks. See?" He pulled a rock out of his bucket and handed it to the Sableye, which grabbed it in its front paws and started crunching on it.

His mother winced at the loud grating sounds and looked disapprovingly at the grit that was falling on the floor as the rock was breaking down. "It sounds messy," she began again.

"It won't be! I'll train it and make sure it doesn't bother anyone and feed it outside and clean up after it and everything!" Lyle insisted. "Please, Mom?" He looked up at her with pleading eyes, and the Sableye took the hint and looked up at her with a similar expression.

His mother looked at the pair for a moment, then sighed. "Well, if we don't have to buy it food and I don't have to do anything about it, I guess it's OK," she finally said. "But you better go find out exactly what you need to do to take care of it. Look it up at a Pokemon Center or the library or something. And clean that up before you go," she added, pointing to the grit on the floor.

After lunch and sweeping the floor, Lyle headed straight for the library to look up Sableyes. He found a couple books on the species and sat in one of the big chairs to look through them. "So...you're a Dark/Ghost type, huh?" he said quietly to the Sableye, who was now perched on the back of the chair and looking down at the books, too. "And this says you don't have any natural weaknesses to any element! That's neat," Lyle continued. There was a list of attacks it could learn but he skipped over that for now and looked up more about how to take care of it.

He found a bit about how they lived in the wild and was a bit dismayed at one fact. "You eat gems? I can't afford gems." He looked up at the Sableye unhappily, but the pokemon only shrugged. Then Lyle thought about it a bit more. "But you still ate those shiny rocks I had. Quartz, people keep telling me. So do you just like gems best but will eat other rocks?" The Sableye nodded, then turned hopped down to point at the picture of crystals in one book. "And that kind more than others?" Lyle guessed. The Sableye nodded again. "OK. I guess I'll have to see what I can find you." He considered it a bit and said, "Maybe I can make some extra money somehow. You can earn money battling, right? If I win some, I can use the money to buy you some nicer stones than the ones I dig up. Nothing really fancy, but maybe the ones you can get in bins at the museum gift shop, like tiger's eye or amethyst." Which reminded him of something else. "Amethyst is a purple stone. I need a name for you. Maybe Amethyst or another purple stone would make a good name." She he looked up books on purple stones.

In a book on gemstones he found a list with pictures and started going down it, looking for potential names. "Purple Garnet...Purple Saphhire...Purple Topaz...they're all better known for different colors," he said, making a face. "No good. Tanzanite, Sugilite, Charoite...I don't like the -ite ones, they don't sound like good names." Amethyst was sounding like the best of them until he came across Spinel. "Huh, haven't heard of Spinel before." He scrutinized the picture, looking between it and the Sableye. "The picture's a lot paler than most of you. But the name sounds cool. What do you think?" The Sableye tilted his head and stared at the picture for a while before grinning and nodding. "OK! You're Spinel, then!" Lyle said happily.

He later found out that Spinels were mostly known for being red, but decided that still worked because his pokemon had a red gem on his chest.

-End-