#celestica

The other bandits, who'd only been looking on in amusement when the one grabbed Volo's mother, immediately reacted and started beating Volo as his mother begged them not to. Then they dragged Volo away and locked him in a storage room. That was the last Volo ever saw of his mother.

The bandits debated what to do with Volo. In the end, they took Volo from the village and sold him to the Rocket Gang. As you might have guessed, the Rocket Gang is the same group that would eventually become Team Rocket. Their leader was an ancestor of Giovanni.

The Rocket Gang leader wasn't sure at first if he was even interested in buying Volo. After all, he wasn't very well-behaved. Despite his bruises, he kept glaring at and trying to bite the men around him. The bandits used Volo's Celestican heritage as a selling point and argued that since Volo was still so young, he was still malleable. The gang leader eventually relented and bought him.

Volo was put to work as a kind of unpaid stableboy. The Rocket Gang was involved in an underground Pokémon battling ring. Volo was tasked with feeding and cleaning the Pokémon used in this ring.

Volo wasn't cooperative at first, but the gang leader was well-experienced in teaching children complacency, and Volo eventually learned that if he wanted to live as painlessly as possible, he would have to obey and do what the Rocket Gang told him to do.

One trick the gang leader had for breaking in children is that he never beat the kids himself. He always had one of his subordinates do it. That way, the kids learn that the gang leader is the source of rewards while his flunkies are the source of pain. That makes them more likely to bond with the gang leader and want to please him.

Often, the gang leader would tell Volo that the only reason he took him in in the first place was because he has a soft spot for children. He has a son Volo's own age, see, and he just couldn't leave Volo with those awful bandits.

These tactics didn't completely work on Volo, who never really stopped hating the gang leader, even after he'd learned his place.

The battles the Rocket Gang participated in weren't like the clean, regulated battles of the modern day. These were brutal matches where Pokémon were pushed past their limit. Think more like the grudge matches that erupted between the cloned Pokémon and their originals in the last third of the first movie.

Since no expense was spared on the healthcare of these Pokémon, it was not uncommon for them to die, either in the ring or afterward from their injuries. Pokémon that performed well were sometimes sold or used for breeding stock.

Naturally, the high turnover rate with the Pokémon the Rocket Gang used made it impossible for Volo to really bond with any of them. As every chance for Volo to form attachments was stolen away, Volo's heart turned colder and more calculating.

However, a chance for salvation appeared unexpectedly. The Rocket Gang would sometimes travel between Kanto, Johto, and even Hoenn for their battles. The trips from Kanto to Hoenn necessitated the use of sea travel.

On one of these trips to Hoenn, Volo noticed a wild Rattata lurking among the cargo hold. It had stowed away on the ship.

Volo started sneaking it food and petting it. The Rattata quickly bonded with Volo, and Volo was pleased to have a Pokémon of his very own, one that wasn't covered in wounds and always lashing out at him like the ones belonging to the Rocket Gang.

Volo managed to keep Rattata hidden for months. At night, when everyone else was asleep, he would train Rattata to follow basic commands, using the same techniques he'd seen the gang leader use with his own partner, a Persian.

He began to feel that he cared for Rattata, even though it was a common Pokémon that would never make any money in the ring. He snuggled with it when he slept.

Tragically, however, their friendship was fated to end. One night, after a particularly heavy loss in the ring, the gang leader was in a particularly foul mood and blamed Volo for not taking care of the defeated Pokémon properly. (Never mind that none of the Pokémon were cared for properly, and that wasn't Volo's fault.) He got so agitated at how much money that he'd lost that he forgot his own personal rule and struck Volo across the face.

Rattata witnessed this from the shadows and was enraged. It launched itself right at the gang leader's face and bit him hard. There was a lot of screaming and flailing as the gang leader tried to throw off Rattata, all in front of a grinning Volo, caught between amusement and sheer adrenaline.

Volo's grin quickly dropped however, when the gang leader finally managed to throw off Rattata. It slammed into the wall and fell to the floor, whereupon it was menaced by Persian.

Rattata tried to fight Persian, but Persian was a lot stronger. Rattata fled and tried to run toward Volo, but by this time several grunts had run into the room, attracted by the commotion. One of the grunts grabbed Rattata roughly by the scruff of its neck before it could reach Volo. Volo tried to make a grab for Rattata, but two more grunts held him down as Rattata was handed over to the gang leader.

Apoplectic with rage and still bleeding from his cheek, the gang leader grabbed a cudgel and beat Rattata to death right in front of Volo.

That was the night that Volo's last chance to be an empathetic person died.

Volo was denied food for a week as punishment. When the week was up, Volo seemed much more behaved. He no longer glowered openly at the gang leader or his grunts. In fact, his demeaner became downright pleasant. He would smile at his captors and seemed eager to please.

Of course, this was all a mask. Volo was simply biding his time, waiting for his chance for revenge.

His chance came when Volo was a teenager. The Rocket Gang came into possession of a very impressive Kantonian Arcanine. Whenever he was alone with it, Volo went out of his way to antagonize the Arcanine. He would tease and poke it in its cage, driving it into an impotent frenzy. Everyone in the gang noticed how ferocious this particular Pokémon was in the ring.

On a sea voyage to Hoenn, Volo carefully composed his expression into a look of anxiety and ran up to an admin on the ship, insisting that something was wrong with one of the Pokémon below deck.

When the admin looked through the cage at the Pokémon Volo had directed them to, Volo went behind her back and opened Arcanine's cage.

The admin was alarmed to see a battle-scared and ferocious Arcanine approaching and cracked the whip she carried to get Arcanine back in its cage. But after months of being harassed by Volo, the Arcanine no longer feared the whip and attacked. The admin couldn't subdue it with her own Pokémon and Arcanine began blasting the surroundings with flame, not caring what it hit. While the admin and Arcanine were distracted, Volo quietly unlocked the rest of the cages and slipped above deck.

Before long the entire ship was engulfed in flame. Volo quietly made for a lifeboat while the rest of the passengers, including the gang leader, were overwhelmed by the chaos. Not only was the ship burning, but the other captive Pokémon had broken out of their cages and were running amok.

The ship sank. Only one lifeboat had been deployed: Volo's.

But then, just as Volo thought it was over, who should pop out of the water right next to his boat but the the gang leader? The gang leader tried to climb aboard the lifeboat. Volo didn't hesitate but grabbed an oar and started beating him over the head with it, just as the gang leader had beat Rattata all those years before.

Of course, the gang leader was bigger and more resilient than that Rattata and managed to wrench the oar out of Volo's hands. An insane struggle to climb onto the boat followed. But Volo was younger and had the high ground (boat?), and he managed to hold the gang leader's head underwater until he drowned.

Volo retrieved his oar and changed course for the Johto region. The surviving Rocket Gang members back in Kanto, including the gang leader's teenage son, never knew what happened to that ship. All they knew was that it never reached its destination in Hoenn, and there were apparently no survivors.

Volo, chasing the memories from his childhood and whatever clues he could find, made his way back to his childhood village, only to find that it had been destroyed long ago. By asking around the neighboring villages, he learned that the bandits burned it before they left. He was never able to learn what became of his mother and father.

With nothing left to tie him to Kanto, he decided to leave for Hisui, which he knew from his parents' stories to be the home of his ancestors. When Volo examined his own feelings, he realized all he felt in connection with the destruction of his village was relief. He wouldn't have to face his parents with all the terrible things he'd done to survive. He wouldn't be forced to live with them in a village he barely remembered, eking out a provincial living in a place where he no longer felt that he belonged. He was completely free to move on to bigger things.

Volo realized that his reactions weren't normal. Isn't it normal to mourn the loss of your home? Isn't it normal to mourn your parents? But Volo had shed his last tear for his parents long ago. He began to think of himself as "broken." He was a "broken person." But it wasn't his fault, he reassured himself. The world had broken him. Only a broken world could create a broken man like him.