"Alright Tenrou, see 'ya later!" Will yelled to his friend as he headed out from Jubilife, where Tenrou lived, back towards Eterna.

"You be careful, alright?" was the reply. "I know it's not too far, but you not having a pokémon of your own and all..."

"Relax, it's not like route 205 is dangerous or anything, and besides, on my bike I can outrun just about any pokémon that comes at me." He was glad for his friend's concern, but it still irked him that he was 17 and still didn't have a pokémon of his own. He had just finished his final term at Sinnoh Pokémon Academy, but his trainer's qualification test was still more than two months away. As he pedaled, his dark brown hair streaked in the wind, and his mind began to wander.Chapter End Notes:PLEASE, IF YOU HAVEN'T ALREADY, READ THE STORY NOTES.
Well just a heads-up to anyone reading my story for the first time: I'm as of right now (September 6, 2008) already done with the first 5 chapters, and have already put them up at DA. However, I'd like to try and reach a wider audience; so from here on out I'm also going to post it here and a few other places as well. "Author's comments" will normally go here at the bottom, and they will likely be the same text as the other sites, so you won't miss any of the story here versus any of the other places. Just a couple of other things to note: The author's notes for the first few chapters don't really reflect how I feel about the story anymore, but I'm leaving them anyways, just know that the story is contantly evolving as I go along. Another point is that I'm pretty likely to add character bio files at some point, but they'll probably be at DA only, since this and the other sites don't really have any category for them, and because they're not technically stories, but are really just supplemental material. And finally, for the first five chapters (the ones I'm uploading all at once right now) I will put an "Origianally posted on " line in front of the author's comments, just so you can have a sort of frame of reference without having to go elsewhere. Well, I hope you enjoyed chapter 1, and that you'll continue to read The Road Less Traveled!

With that now out of the way, here my original notes about chapter 1, followed by the story itself.

ORIGINALLY POSTED ON 5/26/08:
Hey all. This is the first chapter of a Pokemon fanfiction that I'm beginning to write, and I hope you enjoy it. The first chapter is really more of a prologue, but here it is anyways. I don't do too well with writing huge chapters, so expect each one to be around the 3-5k word mark. Finally, I do expect this might get pretty intense at some point, and it may or may not require me to mark this as "mature content." At this point, I only know that I won't shy away from writing anything simply to keep a "PG"-ish rating, so be warned. I admit to being influenced by other works I've seen (who isn't) but I won't outright copy or use anything without first getting consent from the original creator, and I will also credit them below.

--NonaSuomi

Pokemon, and all related characters, etc. (c) GameFreak, Nintendo, The Pokemon Company
Will, Sanakou, Tenrou, and all other characters, as well as all situations (as of now) (c) me (NonaSuomi)
I haven't outright borrowed from his works yet, but credit should go to Slash Firestorm as I've been heavily influenced by his story "Sinners". If you've read his work, you will know what I mean, and you ought to have a pretty good idea of what I'm trying to do.

EDIT ON 2/23/09- Okay, I'm sorry about this, but I seem to have totally boned the HTML formatting here, as all my line breaks appear to have just... gone away. This actually happened as I was trying to add another few chapters in here to TRLT, but I then went through a long chain of events trying to remedy this, ultimately culminating in having to reinstall Adobe Dreamweaver (which I use to convert my rich-text formatting into HTML-friendly tags) and then an extended conversation with my good friend and mentor, Nul. Long and short of the whole deal it this: soon (within the next few days, with any luck) I will get back here and fix this chapter, and once I establish that the formatting works correctly I'll begin uploading chapters 3-7, which I've already completed. Also I'm not sure how I'm supposed to add in chapters before what I've already got done, as I've got a prologue for the story now, which (big surprise) needs to go before this chapter, but that's a problem I'll worry about when I have enough time online to deal with it. Until then, goodbye.

FINAL EDIT (I hope...) ON MAR 11, 2009: Okay, this ought to work now, and I've also added the prologue and chapters 3-7 to boot! Things are finally getting done around here (by me, for once)! Jubilation