The Odd One Out -- A Reborn Story

[Aphelli]

Hi all! 

 

I hope you're doing well.

 

We're getting really close to the fic's second birthday, and it's amazing. Also, the 150 replies and 18k views are incredible. Thank you all for reading, reacting and commenting. 

 

I hope I'll manage to get in one chapter before the end, and then there'll be a magnificent statistics post (or status update) detailing how little I've done this year. Judge for yourselves: I wrote 35 chapters on the first year. If this timetable is consistent, that makes 24 chapters the second year. Granted, they tend to be longer, but it's still certainly a dip in productivity. And writing is getting harder and harder, so perhaps the productivity will fall again next year (also, the PhD). Or perhaps I'll find a way to prepare the chapters better (you know, local plotting and outlining) so that the writing itself becomes smoother. 

 

@Candy

 

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"You get a self-congratulation, and you get a self-congratulation. EVERYBODY GETS A SELF-CONGRATULATION!!!!"

 

Is there a reference I'm unaware of? 

 

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Coincidentally, I did also kinda imply that, at least among the Karens of Reborn region, the gossips tend to fly about (with some of the wards thinking they had a ghost problem, but it was Vanilla/Pikachu).

 

Oh yes, I remember that part.

 

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Yep he was like "Him? I thought she was a her..." and Team Meteor was like "So you've chosen death" and he was like "what is happen?????"

 

Now I wonder how much of the story can be summarized in this style and how much easier it would be. Worse, I'm worried I might fall for it. 

 

 

 

 

On 9/23/2021 at 1:58 PM, Valyrian_Reforged said:

Thank you for your insights. I shall continue to read this fanfiction and see where Gabriel's journey will lead him. I like how realistic your take upon Gabriel's Pokemon journey is. The main games do not take into account how much or how little the protagonist may or may not want to step in and save the Pokemon world/s.

 

They simply thrust the protagonist headlong into the adventure, danger and drama in spectacular fashion because of their own belief that this is the right thing to do for all and by all. This is what makes Gabriel's reluctance logical, reasonable and understandable, in my opinion.

 

Thank you for your reply and your compliments Valyrian! 

 

Although here, I feel important to point out a difference which, I think, matters a lot, but is widely ignored (or viewed as evil or really borderline) in Reborn and similar fangames. And it’s actually part of what I wanted to show in the plot of Part 2. 

 

The games make you do the dramatic or righteous thing. You're forced to do them because they sound like a good idea and you battle evil, not because they're going to help in the best possible way. 

 

Cases in point (spoilers for Reborn, v12!Rejuv, Deso):

Spoiler

Pyrous Mountain and its expy Valor Mountain are Darwin-award levels of lawful stupid. And, well, look how they turn out.

The Orphanage raid in Reborn itself is at least questionable. The Doctor may not be the nicest guy around, but the Orphanage certainly beats being on the street as a ten-year-old orphan. That is, if you're not being exploited by a gang as a drug mule or worse. 

 

Rejuv has the protagonist side with Venam in her moronic meddling with Indriad when she should have known better (creepy manor appears by magic in the sewers, yay, why not break in and blackmail the owner?). More generally, the amount of "allies" and enemies alike that the main cast lets escape (some with crappy cutscene powers) without making an serious attempt to pry information from them (grief-stricken Zetta sounds a likely candidate and is highly typical in that respect -- someone that could give information given the right prompting. Later on, Ren, Alexandra, Damian, Karrina could fit that role as well). 

 

Desolation forces you into gifting world-reshaping to people whom you barely know and seem to honestly believe that they can talk you into trusting them. Or it forces you to battle Scarlett atop that building and only her bow will dissuade her from committing suicide, something which could be achieved more easily by having a Pokemon restrain her instead, or pointing out that a power that requires the sacrifice of an innocent to work is hardly likely to be friendly -- and if it has no moral alignment, then it is controlled by Barron which is a less than stellar person. 

 

In the case of my story, the right thing all throughout Part 1 is probably to call in a (literal) air strike and burn the plants from above (and if Meteor commanders have "accidents" in the process, all the better). Seriously, Ciel would have been completely OP. The best course of action is not to send in a clueless guy with barely any kind of experience into the fray hoping he'll save the day.

 

Imagine that instead of murderous plants, you had a mine field to cross. You wouldn't ask a wannabe hero or Indiana Jones or the Navy SEALS or the Chosen One or anyone else to go there. You would call in a bomb-disposal expert, or find something else that would set them off (I don't know, empty trucks?), get far away and send them in to set them off once (hence destroying them) and for all.

 

Not that all these examples make the games’ plots bad – my point is that what the right thing is is not an open-and-shut case, especially for in a story (or, really, a universe) that tries to not be as clear cut as the official games.

 

 

On 9/23/2021 at 1:58 PM, Valyrian_Reforged said:

In regard to the lateness of your updates, worry not - life delays the rest and the best of us and I imagine that I won't be the first among the fans and the readers of your written works to say that writing as great as your own is well worth the wait.

 

It's easy to feel as though you may have let your audience down via your time away from your keyboard. Know that you have not done so and that you could not do so. Keep up the fantastic work - I'm cheering you from the sidelines, my writer friend.

 

Thank you again! 

To be honest, I'm more worried about delays in some abstract sense rather the fact that my readers are made to wait. I feel (and I can only hope that no one minds) that this is part of the implicit contract we have: I share this story because I like writing it and I hope to have interested readers, but I do other stuff too, and my muse does not cooperate all the time, and I upload when I feel ready. 

 

Maybe I’ve become desensitized as the schedules of stories I liked became messed-up and delays stretched. Maybe my induction that delays and missed deadlines are standard for (running) online fan-fictions, in a sense, is wrong. But it’s really hard to write any other way. 
 

What bothers me more about delays is that they tend to snowball (“I can always start the new chapter next week”), and, with my muse straining these days, it's better to not have any momentum against me.

 

 

Anyway, back to the story. E19 is drawing near, and I've decided to do something absolutely ridiculous (to show my work): I'm going to spoil you everything that I think is in store in the story. As ciphertexts*, of course. So, below are encrypted sentences about what comes next. It's using a form of one-time pad on (a custom modification of) ascii codes of characters using pieces of quotes from a few random books lying around at home as keys.

 

I'm not expecting you to decipher these. What I'm doing is, in a sense, signing these predictions.  As in: I made them before E19, and if some stuff in the episode (or, come to think of it, another Reborn story anywhere) goes along these lines, well... I thought of them too, on my own. 

 

Anyway, here goes. Crystal clear, isn't it? 

 

Spoiler

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Anyway, chapter time (at last!)

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 58: Little Bugs

 

 

Spoiler

I collapsed in an armchair after I entered the Pokemon Center and gave the nurse my Pokemon to heal, a better treatment that my items could accomplish. I felt so comfortable sprawling in the armchair that I struggled to get up to fetch my healed-up Pokemon. I was relieved, I was safer, and, regardless of obvious security reasons -- my limited valuables, more important precisely for this reason -- I really wanted to doze there for at least a couple of hours.

 

The armchair vanished. One second it was there, and the next one I was sitting on thin air, and fell on my back, to the snickering of the few people around, who, I realized, were all standing and never relying on anything.

 

"I'm sorry about that." the nurse said as I carefully got up and dragged my bag to the counter. "Things have been moving around in this town in the past few days. They're teleporting at random. No one knows why or how."

 

"People, too?" I asked, curious and with a certain resigned sense of dread. After all, that had happened to me too.

 

"Sometimes, but not very often. It's usually pieces of furniture, or smaller things. It's super inconvenient, but not that dangerous."

 

But, I thought dully, why entire people? Why not bits of people? It should be easier to teleport a finger or an arm than an entire person...

 

"Entire people?" I questioned again, wanting to be sure, even though I was confident that she would have told me if it weren't the case.

 

"Yes."

 

"We're running a little betting pool." someone chimed in. "Whether a house is going to end up on Serra's terraces. Do you want to participate?"

 

"No, thank you." I answered, trying not to let my anxiety show.

 

I hadn't realized that the situation in town was so bad. For my own safety, I couldn't stay there. Really, the only way I could get out fast would be to be a League-challenging Trainer, defeat the Gym Leader quickly, and then go fast towards the other Gyms. They couldn't be less safe.

 

If I knew where they were.

 

"Serra is the town's Gym Leader, right?" I asked the person who had suggested I bet on her terraces being damaged.

 

"Yes, she is. Ice-type." someone else said. "Her Gym is full of glass and mirrors, it's a bit weird to watch, but it must be even weirder to battle there."

 

Ice, I thought. Glass and mirrors.

 

Which of my Pokemon could help in such a situation? Of course, Leaf would be extremely happy to play her part, but she couldn't be enough. Tech could be extremely helpful, perhaps Watt and maybe Hex too... It might not be a good idea to let Stoutland charge in a room full of glass and mirrors, as she could easily injure herself. And while Batley was frail and at a type disadvantage, perhaps she would still be able to set up and sweep?

 

Sicy the Vanillish and Antum the Klink, perhaps Melian the Chansey might be interesting, if I took the time to train them just a little bit more, and let them evolve. But that was a time I did not want to really take. The city was like a ticking time-bomb. With everything teleporting around, I risked a deadly accident every second, which mandated a constant vigilance. And I was abysmal at that.

 

But look what happened to the person whose motto it was.

 

"I see." I finally answered. "Thank you. By the way," I added, with a rushed realization of what the most pressing thing I had to do truly was, "do you know where I can find anything to eat?"

 

 

                                                                                              *

 

It was past two in the afternoon, so, while I managed to find something that wasn't completely junk food, and which beat taking sweets for the third meal in a row, it wasn't great. But finding anything great would have been a little difficult, as I learnt that most professional ovens had been turned off after a few nasty accidents.

 

After that, I went straight to the Gym, which, as I recalled from El's directions, was in the northeastern corner of the town.

 

But then, knowing that I was out of the woods, literally, if not quite metaphorically, I could appreciate better what was wrong with the town. Spinel Town in its better days could have been beautiful and quiet, a retreat from a more interesting city life. Even if December did not suit it, with most of its trees still and leafless and its small parks bare, the town center was human-scaled, with appartment buildings a few stories high and small shops rather than all-purpose department stores and Reborn City's bigger, lackluster and unsound structures.

 

Further from that, the constructions were closer to brick or stone country houses, each with some land, with hedges to materialize limits of the properties. Often, the hedges surrounded a cluster of such houses, with perhaps only a couple of entrances to the ensemble.

 

But with the teleportation curse -- was there any other word -- rampant, it had acquired a most peculiarly chaotic look. Benches were atop trees, or perhaps the reverse. There were pieces of furniture outside, to most people's indifference, except for the owner when they managed to find it out. One of the apartment buildings had a car on its rooftop, which still remained above most people's weirdness levels. But not really me, since I knew this to be possible without anything more mundane than a few mischievous engineering students.

 

It was extremely unsettling to see a dishwasher that somehow kept running outside, or a washing machine completing its cycle after spitting out a few lone socks to who knew where. In a more cartoonish style, some balls tended to appear under people's feet, a guarantee to trip.

 

There were some more original sights as well. A table-tennis table had had a couple of legs replaced by stakes, and then collapsed. I would later learn that the school had had to close because the lab's lithium had been exchanged with an ice-cube, with results I wished I could have safely seen. Pieces of rail that may or may not have been trying to draw the genealogy tree of royal families from Kalos and around were lying on the ground, isolated from any track -- apparently, they came from the abandoned Reborn Railnet. I saw water taps turning light bulbs on, and dishes, or sometimes pans, flying at people, too. I started keeping track of them a lot more carefully after one of them failed to guillotine me. Not that it had a chance to succeed, but its failure was enough of a pain in the neck.

 

Serra's white and wide house was rather isolated on the outskirts of the town, northeast. But the Gym itself was a little bit closer. For a place of glass and mirrors, it didn't have many windows, and was made of brick. I expected it to be a little wider, for everything it had to contain -- puzzle, Trainers, the main arena. But I didn't dwell on this and I circled the building until I found the challengers' entrance. It wasn't too hard; it had been written with a marker on the door.

 

I blinked upon entering. The room was small, brightly lit and highly symmetrical. It had mirrors everywhere and even the impeccable tiling seemed to reflect light. However, some of the mirrors seemed to be missing, and a few had been broken by a hiking boot or a phone book. I knew that because they were still lying on the floor with glass debris. The overall effect was extremely disorienting. There was at least a dozen other Gabriels in the room and it was not a sight I appreciated particularly. They looked like they were kitten-killers or something like that.

 

Which wasn't close to what I was. But never mind.

 

There was a communicating device on my left, exactly as in the other Gyms. If I wanted to get out of the town as quickly as possible, I needed to win the battles. So I needed a good idea of what was going to happen. I called the Grand Hall.

 

"Hello?" a voice answered through the communication panel, one I hadn't heard in a while.

 

"Ame?" I asked, a little bit surprised that she was willing to answer me.

 

There was a silence. A noise of static. And then we were cut off. Or, more likely, Ame had tinkered with her end and hanged up. There was little point in calling back. If Ame didn't want to speak to me, since I bore her only bad news, I didn't have to harass her. If I wanted out, I could just ditch the League and make my own way, hopefully to Kalos.

 

Like that was going to happen. The closest station on the way back was hundreds of kilometers away. Anyway, my choice was simple: stay or leave. There were other doors in the room, and, although they didn't look very welcoming and were probably locked anyway, perhaps there were people behind these doors and they could give me an explanation of what I could expect.

 

I could put my bag down, but I didn't like leaving it lying outside my field of vision, and I didn't want to let it be sent away to who knew where. I spent a little time pondering whether to risk disturbing whoever could be in the neighboring rooms, trying to pick up noises, but there didn't seem to be any. So I decided to give it a try. What was the worst that could happen?

 

Why again did I have to ponder this specific question? The worst was so hard to stumble upon, so easy to "improve" on...

 

So I took a deep breath, knocked and waited. Nothing happened. So I knocked again, a little stronger, a little more insistent. And I waited again. I didn't have better things to do.

 

Until, after I had stopped believing I would be answered and just stayed there in indecisiveness, one of the doors opened, and a pale, lean young man with glasses and long black hair came into the room. He looked about my age and was slightly taller than I was. He wore dark trousers and a dark sweat-shirt. He didn't look very happy, but he made a visible effort and his face mellowed.

 

"Good afternoon." he extended a hand, his tone very precise. "My name is Bennett. I am a lepidopterist."

 

"Gabriel." I shook his hand, a little bit surprised at the formulation. "Nice to meet you. So, er... you study butterflies?"

 

"Yes," his face brightened. "Moths, too. And other families of bugs, too, although butterflies are closest to my heart. You see, they start off as caterpillars, but they grow to so much more than they are. It's fascinating!"

 

Was it? It certainly was, although it didn't touch me as much. Then again, many things just as remarkable probably moved me and not that many other people. Complex analysis, for instance. A lot of the little functional analysis I knew, for sure. Integration, of course. And many fascinating ways in which one could use algebraic methods to solve geometric problems -- the too-good-to-be-true trade-off of underlying complexity for meaning offered by cohomologies? The apparently highly sophisticated ways (the names of schemes and étale cohomology came to mind, but I didn't know what they actually meant) where geometric intuition was the main idea that helped solve completely algebraic questions?

 

But never mind all of these. It would take a while before I met some inspiring math again.

 

"But, even before then, they have some remarkable characteristics: did you know, for instance, that Cascoon had perfect memories?"

 

I heard the excitement in his voice and felt bad for not sharing Bennett's interest. I knew from experience how frustrating it had to be to never be able to share one's passion. What it was to keep talking of it to someone, anyone, hoping against hope to share what you held dear, half-willingly mistaking polite approbation for genuine interest, for fear of realizing that most of what you could say would not convey an ounce of meaning to an interlocutor, of confronting the dreary reality that what meant most to you was something few could, or would, begin to understand.

 

"Despite barely ever moving," he went on, "they will never forget a battle! And, once they evolve, they are surprisingly able to exact any form of retaliation for what happened earlier in their life! When you think about this, they truly are small genuises..."

 

It sort of made sense, actually...

 

Wait, Cascoon didn't evolve into Beedrill, right?

 

"But their evolution isn't renowned for seemingly spontaneous retaliation, is it?" I frowned.

 

"No, indeed, but this is the truly intelligent part. A Dustox seeking revenge is considerably more subtle than even most humans. They will use a variant of their Psychic attacks that tends to trigger severe headaches and fatigue to humans. As the effect is not immediate, they will not use it for any other purpose. Few people ever realize what happened to them afterwards."

 

"Sorry to change the topic," I inhaled, "but why are you in this Gym though? I thought this was Ice-type?"

 

"Ah." his enthusiastic expression vanished. "The Gym Leader is my mother. I was supposed to bring you over to the house, where she is to explain you how this Gym works."

 

"News travels fast." I commented. They hadn't been much time between my call to Ame and Bennett arriving, perhaps ten minutes maximum.

 

"Serra made me rush here. Let us not keep her waiting." he motioned to me to come through the door from which he had entered. On the other side, there was a stairwell with a far more sober decoration and another exit.

 

"The main arena is downstairs." Bennett explained. "It makes for a better lighting."

 

He walked to the other door, produced a key, and froze.

 

"Bother."

 

He pushed the door, as the keyhole was gone.

 

 

*

 

 

Serra's house's decoration was enchanting. The living room was sparkling with white light coming from a superb crystal chandelier, completed by natural light from two large windows, and a few white lamps. Or were they? The entire room, walls and furniture, was colored in various subtle hues of blues, greens, pinks so pale they were almost white. The colors were everywhere, so pale they could almost be mistaken for one another, almost sent from one place to another by the mirrors, shining with a changing hue. It didn't look like anything was missing or in an awkward position -- everything seemed to be clearly where intended.

 

A slim woman in perhaps her late thirties was sitting very straight in a sofa, her legs crossed. Her hair was neatly split in two parts impeccably dyed: one in light blue, and the other in pale pink. She was wearing a sweater with a very beautiful blue, black leather trousers and black loafers. I recognized El dozing off in an armchair.

 

"Mother," Bennett started, disregarding the priest's presence. "the lock of the other entrance to the Gym has vanished."

 

"Has it? I suppose it was only a matter of time before we got another one of these teleportations. And you would be Gabriel, I suppose?" the woman turned towards me.

 

Her voice sounded surprising: it was a little older, a little wearier, than she looked. I nodded.

 

"I'm Serra, the Gym Leader." she said, her voice guarded and cautiously neutral. "Please, sit down." I found a seat. "First, I suppose I should relay you what Ame said."

 

Relay what Ame said? She wanted to tell me things, but not herself...

Plausible deniability.

 

There was no way anything good would come from this, was there?

 

"Okay." I said dully, dreading what I was about to hear.

 

"There's a part with a conspiracy to kidnap orphans that I don't quite understand, though. She said it's not as bad as it sounds." she stared at me, her blue eyes inquisitive, unsettlingly intense.

 

Ame said it was kidnapping... What could that mean?

 

What was the point in thinking about it anyway since I was going to tell her the truth as I knew it?

 

"There's an Orphanage in Reborn City, in the Lapis Ward." I started. "You know of Corey? The old Poison Gym Leader? He, er, died..." I counted, trying to remember. "Nine days ago. He had a daughter, Heather. The doctor of the Orphanage forcefully took her in. I wasn't too thrilled, but I figured it was better than have her roaming the streets and their dangers. And then we learnt that the Doctor forced her and many other children into ECT sessions. I did the proper thing, informing authorities. But someone else who knew of the situation -- a teenager who meant well, sure -- decided to take immediate action. He convinced Shelly -- one of Heather's friends -- to go with him. They broke Heather and a few other children from the Orphanage, at least two more Gym Leaders. Then they got kidnapped again. It was long and perilous, but we fortunately managed to free them with Aya and Hardy's help -- they're Leaders too. And of course, we didn't return them to the Orphanage -- we went to one of the children's old family home. That's kidnapping: taking children from their lawful residence."

 

"I see." Serra seemed to digest it. "This makes sense, I suppose. Ame said that Saphira had tried to piece together what had happened and was particularly interested in you. Which is why she was glad that her Leader hadn't done anything rash."

 

Never done anything rash. Right. 

 

This was also confirmation that being alone with an angry Saphira could be a terminally bad idea. In other words, I had been lucky. 

 

"Anyway, a few officials in Reborn are annoyed at you and, well... you're wanted there. Which is why she can't be talking to you, and you had better get ask the Gym Leaders for information rather than the Grand Hall."

 

Great.

 

But, I also realized uneasily, that meant that it would be difficult to board a train when the station would be rebuilt, too.

 

"But the police is apparently willing to defend you, so, while Ame suggests to stay outside the city for a while, she doesn't think it should be too much of an issue if you took trips there."

 

"And what of Cain and Shelly -- the other people involved in this 'kidnapping'?" I asked, a bit ashamed to think of them so late, and making sure that every rhetorical precaution was applied to the word 'kidnapping'.

 

"Ame didn't mention them, so I don't know. That's pretty much the end of her message."

 

Okay...

 

"As for the Gym." she changed her tone a mere dutiful messenger's to something slightly more interested. But the same weariness was still there. She hadn't left her sofa. "It is an Ice-type Gym, as you probably know. Mirrors are its theme. I used to be a model, so I know mirrors well, and I like them. They reflect so much more than appearances."

 

Er... what?

 

"I like to find art in their reflections and imperfections. My arena uses moving mirrors too. In such a treacherous environment, we can play games of accuracy and evasiveness. It is easy to hit the wrong target, but from time to time, the mirrors will reflect -- sometimes even strengthen -- the attack and re-direct it, perhaps even to its target. Of course, light and beam attacks, offensive or defensive such as my Aurora Veil, will be favored. And I nearly forgot: mirrors are sharp and fragile too: a Pokemon hitting a mirror with a physical move may well break it and injure itself."

 

I knew where I might find even more specific information. On that Pokegear app that Florinia had given me. If it still worked.

 

"Thank you for your explanations." I replied, trying to take it all in.

 

So, get screens, and light attacks. Not I had many of them. I wished that mirrors could be electrical conductors. Then it would have been a cakewalk with Watt. Unfortunately, it wasn't the case, and I would have to fight without great advantage. Which was fine, probably. After all, so were the most important battles. 

 

"Can we do this now, Ms. Serra?"

 

"Unfortunately," she answered, "not quite. But it shouldn't be too long. It can be ready in forty-five minutes."

 

"Okay." I decided after a slight hesitation. "Can I please stay here in the meantime?"

 

"Of course." she answered. "Make yourself comfortable."

 

 

*

 

I had forgotten that Gyms, at least established ones, had puzzles. Serra's was no exception, and her riddle was original. I was ushered, a scarf over my eyes, in the center of a small room whose walls consisted all of mirrors, whose very floor was reflective. The room itself was divided into four quarters, colored in pale shades of blue, green, pink and purple. Apart from the change in coloring, they all were reflections of the others, except for one detail -- a wrong drawer, a missing photograph on a shelf, that one unreflective floor spot -- in one of the quarters.

 

Finding the location of this detail wasn't as easy as it sounded, because all the mirrors strengthened the impression of symmetry and repetition. They messed with my sense of distance, my orientation, deceived my eyes into believing that the room was infinite, made it difficult to be utterly sure which parts were virtual (as would be said in an optics class) and which were real. Moreover, in the last room, one of the chairs had been teleported away, which only obscured the actual intended solution.

 

It wasn't easy either to battle the three or four Gym Trainers that had answered Serra's call in such rooms. But it wasn't too hard overall. They weren't here to give me a challenge, they were more like a warm-up, with the two Pokemon each. Leaf could win these fights once she was accustomed to the peculiar landscape.

 

What did surprise me was to find, in the larger underground arena, Bennett waiting for me. As Serra had explained, the arena a wide cage of mirrors, a lof of them moving in straight lines or outright slowly rotating, and the challengers were supposed to be in glass cages, with only a narrow slot at waist height to push Pokeballs through. There were perhaps twenty seats, the heights of which were raised, on the side of the arena, mostly invisible from the arena itself thanks to a few one-way mirrors.

 

Serra was sitting on one of them, with El at the other end.

 

"I will not beat around the bush, Gabriel." Bennett started earnestly. "I would be much obliged if I could battle you."

 

Right. An unexpected battle against an unknown opponent on a brand new arena. Great plan.

 

Bennett must have seen something on my face, because he went on: "I hope to become a Gym Leader myself someday. "

 

I wondered whether Ame would be looking for a Bug-type Leader if Shelly did not get her Pokemon back. Perhaps I could suggest Bennett to ask her for the position. But I feared that it would rip just another part of Shelly's life. Ordinarily, I would have offered this idea to Bennett. But now, with Reborn City and Ame unwelcoming and Shelly losing most of the life she had had because of direct or indirect effects of my actions -- I didn't care as much.

 

"To this effect, I prepare myself by requiring from all of Mother's challengers that I battle them first."

 

Were she to know about this, would Shelly directly tell Ame about a possible replacement?

That was wild speculation, sure. Then I had another idea.

 

"That's a fine way to prepare yourself." I answered Bennett. "But," I mused, "wouldn't it be an even better preparation if you gave the challengers advance notice, and thus let them counterteam you?"

 

"It could be." he answered seriously. "But very few challengers seem to make the effort of creating a brand new Pokemon team crafted specifically to defeat Mother. Most will fight with the Pokemon they already possess, hardly changing their team. But I digress. What do you say?"

 

It might be a good idea to test the arena first. It could be a good idea to learn to fight at a disadvantage against an opponent I didn't prepare for. Besides, Bennett was a Bug-type specialist, perhaps even about butterflies, usually not the strongest bugs, while I had a well-rounded team of stronger, bulkier Pokemon. How hard could it be?

 

So I agreed, provided Serra didn't have anything against it.

 

A decision I came to quickly regret. Bennett had been underselling his abilities. He knew the arena by heart, the movements of its mirrors by memory. Battling was, in his situation, like a musician starting from a tune and playing it out by ear only, improvising at the speed of song when he needed to rectify unexpected developments and dissonant notes.

 

His Pokemon danced in the air, flew closer and away, used the mirrors to fake their moves, blew powders to help camouflage themselves. Tech's screens were useful, but what was the point in erecting them if, most of the time, my Pokemon couldn't hit their enemies?

 

Leaf was swift, but the butterflies were, unsurprisingly, swifter, and most the time she just hit a mirror anyway. One single Power Gem or Discharge from Watt should have been enough to take Bennett's bugs out, but she was too slow, and neither the magical rocks, nor the electricity could either rebound or pierce the mirrors. Hex and Mouse were the same as Watt and Leaf, but worse, because their moves weren't as effective. Only the flying Batley was able to even the field, but there was only one of her against five of Bennett's bugs.

 

The battle was so one-sided, the defeat so unexpected at first and ineluctable then, that there was no point in feeling bitter about it. I couldn't have won this on these terms. Full stop.

 

"Well played." I admitted. "You're really good."

 

And I'm really bad. I thought privately.

 

"Thank you." he nodded. "I wish I could genuinely return the compliment. Perhaps you need a little more practice."

 

I was spared the necessity of pondering the relevance of Bennett's advice (definitely spot-on), because El had risen from his stand and was coming to see us:

 

"This has been an impressive battle for both of you." he said emphatically. "Certainly, you both have been gifted by Arceus's light."

 

"I don't believe in such 'light', sir." Bennett answered simply, as if discussing the average size of a Cascoon. "Instead, I believe in diligence and commitment."

 

El seemed to allow himself a gentle smile.

 

"How very typical of my old age to forget about the mindset of the young ones. But if you will, such diligence, such commitment will take you far. In truth, I believe that you could rise to the level of the Elite Four."

 

Bennett's eyes widened as he heard the sudden praise and the incredible prospect.

 

"The... The Elite Four, sir?" he asked, visibly flustered. "But I am not..." he had an embarrassed smile. "I am far from being this good yet."

 

El had to have studied for years to manage to convey acceptance, patience, encouragement all at once by one small hand gesture.

 

"Perhaps not now. But in time."

 

The praise given to Bennett stung my pride a little, but it was obviously deserved. And, by contrast, it only highlighted how inept I had been on this field. The League was no joke. If I didn't turn things around, I wouldn't manage to get much ahead.

 

It shouldn't have been a problem, except that I still had to survive Team Meteor and that they had some truly fearsome battlers -- on top of ruthlessness, scarily advanced technology and a weird choice of use cases.

 

PULSE Camerupt, what an idiotic plan, really...

 

"Serra?" I made my mind and asked the actual Leader, who was staying further back from all three of us. "I'm sorry for disturbing you. I think I'm just not ready to fight you yet."

 

"Aren't you?" she seemed a little bit surprised, but her tone conveyed no other emotion, no diappointment. "You did fine, you know? Many challengers lost to my son and still were able to beat me. We really don't battle in the same way. And now you know the field a little better."

 

These were good arguments indeed, but I rejected them. I didn't know how to convey my bone-deep certainty to be under-prepared, to be devoid of advantages in this fight, that I was running headfirst towards another defeat, that I would be wasting her time.

 

I needed a better, more ready Pokemon team. I needed ways to exploit the field at my advantage. And I didn't have them... yet. But I would find them. Just not today.

 

Hopefully soon enough. I reminded myself. It would be dangerous to stay around this town too long.

 

 

 

Character rates:

Spoiler

El: 8/10 (+1). Nice of him to encourage Bennett, even though I wished he had praised me instead. 

Bennett: 7/10. A kindred spirit of sorts, without the blood stains. He's nice enough, and he's so good...

Serra: 7/10. She's been pretty accomodating, but it's hard to say anything more. 

 

Player's note:

Spoiler

 

Bennett's team can look weak at first glance: one Pokemon is not even fully evolved, and the rest is made of quite underwhelming bugs. 

However, given that these bugs all have Quiver Dance, that most run Sleep Powder with Bright Powders, Bennett is not to be taken lightly. 

 

 

That's why I was very nervous when planning for the fight, afraid of a million bad chances, and in particular of my own mons' weakness. But here's what actually happened:

 

 

 

You probably know this drill by now. 

 

 

 

 

Screens are a huge advantage, and they're better on the Mirror Arena. Larvesta is only physical but all five other mons are special sweepers so every little bit helps. In the meantime, Larvesta just uses Bug Bite. 

 

 

Hard switch. Guess where this is going? 

 

 

Simple Calm Mind. In easier times, that would guarantee a complete sweep. But now...

 

 

Well, nothing else to do than play it out, no? This is just Air Slash spam now and pray that it doesn't miss too much. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

No Air Slash missed, so that's a clean sweep, while I expected something much more difficult. Not that I'm complaining. Battles that go better than expected are so rare these days...

 

 

Author’s note:
 

Spoiler

I got my ideas about Serra’s outfit from some acquaintances whose judgement on clothing I trust more than my own. But they don’t have the full picture in mind, so it is possible that the result is… wrong, stylistically speaking.

If this is the case, please consider that Serra knows how to dress and look well, and has chosen to do so, and lay the blame on my own ignorance. 

 

*I am aware that One Does Not Roll One's Own Crypto. This does not have the safety guarantees of tried and tested cryptosystems. Only do something like this if you're slightly mad, and if there's nothing really important in there. Seriously, people went through a lot of trouble to develop good crypto for transmitting passwords (in an ideal world, maybe?), bank account numbers, emails for your local intelligence agency only and not the foreign ones, etc, and I'm almost metaphorically spitting in their face by doing something this absurd. If you feel offended please don't roast me too much. Also, if you broke one of the codes, pm me instead of spoiling everyone else :).  

[Aphelli]

Hi! 

I hope that you're doing well. 

 

I said it, and I meant it -- there is another chapter right before the fic's birthday. I'll try to either edit this post or reply tomorrow to add some statistics. The story is now fifty-nine chapters long, and I believe, before checking out, that it will pan out to at least 300 pages and 150,000 words, far more than e.g. Prisoner of Azkaban (but we might not have reached the 190,000-ish words of Goblet of Fire), so I'm trying to find a better format than Word for the entire content. I'll tell you tomorrow (I hope) if I managed it. 

 

This chapter is an unexpected idea I had while on vacation. I suppose that, like these little ideas of mine, it's hit or miss, and therefore your honest feedback is (even more than usual) appreciated.  

 

 

I guess I should give a warning about description of nasty physical injuries, but it's one of the things in this chapter/arc that I'm not too sure about.  

 

 

Chapter 59: Pentest

 

Spoiler

It was about two full days since Saphira had notified Gabriel that he was unwelcome at their house. The daylight was slowly weakening, and soon the late autumn sun would sink below the mountains. But not quite yet. Saphira had been very busy since the morning, taking a shopping trip to Reborn City and a rushed negotiation with Ciel, whom she knew personally as the Flying-type Gym Leader and by renown as a circus starlet and gifted acrobat.

 

It had started the day before, a Monday in the morning, when Laura had, by the sheer bad luck that only a seven-word sentence could have brought her, seen the Doctor with a squad of people clad in black, an unusual sight in the wilderness of these mountains. Of course, this piece of news had worried every resident of the house, as Charlotte had explained with disgust that Connal was now a Team Meteor affiliate.

 

So Saphira had been wondering about their hideout. They had scores to settle, now that the old bastard wasn't bothering to pretend to act in her and her sisters' best interest.

 

They had scores of scores to settle.

 

Team Meteor had stolen all the children's Pokemon, and taken Anna and Heather's jewels. Worse, Anna seemed to have relapsed, and even Laura's medicine seemed powerless to soothe her again. The little girl's feverish babble was fixated on how the theft of the Amethyst Pendant had hurt Nostra. Not that Heather didn't hurt from the loss of her Ruby Ring, but she was, unfortunately, rather less expressive and her most eager would-be translator, Shelly, struggled to bring herself to blurt something like that out. It was obvious, wasn't it? 

 

As the two elder Belrose sisters were flying slowly at very low altitude -- not more than fifteen meters, just enough to avoid but the most annoyingly tall trees -- over the Tanzan Mountains, Laura was wondering about what they were about to do. It had been Saphira's idea, of course. Her eldest sister had spent all day preparing for it, of course, letting her play baby-sitter to the children that she certainly knew better. Laura couldn't pinpoint exactly what felt wrong, but Saphira had decided on this raid, alone. Then she had expanded her arguments, patiently addressed Laura's objections, and fully expected her to be onboard.

 

Which Laura was, of course. Saphira had been through so much, seen so much outside the Orphanage -- unlike her, who had chosen to live in the mountains as a reclusive, somewhat self-centered gardener -- that it was simply absurd to question her judgement. To directly participate in the cruel ways of an inhumanely cold world, Laura trusted her sister's judgement well over her own, even though she very vaguely felt the need to be consulted, acknowledged as a peer in the decision-making. Not just someone whose acceptance was taken for granted because it was always granted.

 

Just like Gabriel, Laura could have thought, were she able to express this fuzzy feeling without being shocked at what she would have deemed a sacrilege. Saphira had gathered information, come to a conclusion on her own, acted on it and made Laura act on it too, and only afterwards had she explained herself. And, of course, it had made sense, even though it didn't match Laura's observations at all. But that was because she, Laura, the recluse, was wrong.

 

So, Saphira had decided on her own that, once she and Laura had discovered Team Meteor's hideout, they would give them a memorable warning about attacking Charlotte. They would ransackle their base and take back the children's Pokemon and Anna and Heather's jewelry.

 

But it hadn't stopped there. The house, Saphira had reasoned, wasn't safe. It stood out too much in the surrounding emptiness, it was too close to the city, where it was recorded that it had burnt a decade ago. Not to mention the effect that it had on Charlotte, who was always hesitant to touch anything, as if she still expected it to catch fire. So the simplest solution had been to relocate to another place about forty kilometers away north, Calcenon City, where Charlotte's official Gym was anyway situated. Hence Saphira's call and subsequent negotiation with Ciel, who had finally caved in.

 

Cain didn't want the lift, and thus was staying at the house while everyone else was flying away on Ciel's Pokemon. Anna was on Ciel's Mega Altaria with the acrobat, which allowed everyone to leave in one go. It was far from ideal, given Anna's state, but, at the little girl's surprisingly vehement prayer, Saphira had overruled Ciel and Laura's concerns. Noel had been uncomfortable with the idea too, but he hadn't voiced it, guessing that Anna would have had the last word anyway.

 

So Saphira was riding her Dragonite and Laura her less impressive but still formidable Tropius, and they were just a peak away from their objective, which could conceal them a bit. The Tropius switched to stationary flight and Laura managed to voice her concerns.

 

"Saphira," she said, "I have a bad feeling about this."

 

"There is nothing to fear, Laura." Saphira replied evenly. "They're going to fear us, not the opposite."

 

"But nobody has reason to fear me, Saphira!" Laura argued. "I am but a gardener, innocent and harmless."

 

"Think of Charlotte." Saphira hissed. "She told you what they did to her. How they treated her. Picture it. Imagine what she felt like."

 

Laura tried.

 

It burnt. She didn't know what wave of energy fell over her, but she felt that her hands were clenching the Tropius's neck, her nails biting into the Pokemon's skin. She felt so hot it made her head twist.

 

"Imagine what they did to everyone." Saphira went on. "How many children lost their parents, how many parents lost their children. Of the surviving families, how many of their dreams were eaten by the corrupted water, uprooted by the plants. Think of Heather's pain about Corey."

 

Laura felt light-headed, the visions entering her mind and unable to leave it, the sheer depth of human misery overloading her. Her breathing was growing hoarse, she was trembling, and, she realized, a red veil, very soft but unmistakeable, was slowly covering her very eyes.

 

"This is anger, Laura, and you're burning with it." Saphira noted, her voice steadier, very controlled. "I see it everywhere in you. Keep the fire, and you will be obeyed. And remember that you are in control of it, not the reverse."

 

"It's hard," Laura muttered, her teeth clenched. So hard. So hard. She felt like the tight rope of a bow, tense to her breaking point and even beyond, wondering how she hadn't exploded yet.

 

"It is." Saphira agreed. "But this, beyond your fighting skill, is your -- our -- best advantage. We are going", she articulated, voice hard, "to wreck their shit. Take back anything that is ours, and take revenge. Anything in your path, tear through it. Anyone you find -- make them fear you."

 

"You're not saying much." Laura snapped between her teeth. She didn't mention that sometimes it might not be the best idea to tear through anything electrical, chemical, or explosive. And as she thought that, suddenly the mental red lenses imposed on her eyes weakened and the world was getting its usual colors back.

 

Saphira had a minute smile. She hadn't expected that the cure for Laura's self-imposed speech compulsion could just be a dose of anger.

 

"And what if they don't want to talk? I can't make them."

 

But Laura was thinking of Charlotte again, and suddenly she wasn't so sure that she couldn't make these rats beg for their worthless lives and extract every bit of worthwhile information from their broken articulations and punctured organs and spilled guts and...

 

"Your anger, your power, should impress most of them." Saphira replied, cursing herself for expecting so much, so soon. "For the other ones, they'll most likely not be new to crime. Ask them who you remind them of."

 

"What kind of stupid question is that?" Laura snapped.

 

"Laura," Saphira said, and Laura suddenly realized that there was a reason why her sister's voice was so even, and it wasn't because the Reborn top Gym Leader was at peace, "I know this environment. And the people there know of me."

 

Laura didn't know it in as many words, but Saphira had been an enforcer for one of the major Reborn City gangs in the first two years after she left the Orphanage. In this world, fighting wasn't about silly, proper Gym challenges, but brutal brawls where caring about 'rules' was one way among many to end up as hostage, prisoner, loot, or corpse. Everyone had learnt the hard way to beware her flaring temper backed up by an almost unrivalled fighting skill, and the same implacable fury had mowed down her own employers when she witnessed them doing something she would not condone.

 

But it wasn't the first time that Saphira alluded to her past, and Laura knew better than doubt her sister on that point.

 

While they flew closer to the Meteor hideout, Saphira was telling Laura the last instructions, and advice she remembered from dozens of raids in the underworld.

 

"Our first objective is the Pokemon." Saphira stated. "Next, the jewels. We're going to mess them up regardless, so we'll have got even with them even if we don't do either. Here's a communicator I bought in Reborn City: we'll stay in touch. Cain will call us when the kids arrive in Calcenon. Keep your messages short and precise, so no word counting please. Don't use full names, just use code."

 

"I'll go in first and draw them to me. You'll go in at my signal, a couple of minutes after that. I mess them up and distract them, you look for the Pokemon and the jewels. When inside, everyone else can be an enemy or a liar. Everything can be a trap. We don't have the layout of the place, so be extra careful. Enemies can come from everywhere."

 

Saphira noted that the tension and anger on Laura's face were replaced with sudden apprehension, and worried she might have overestimated her sister. But there were good news too, lessons that a failed storming of a rather literal tax haven had produced...

 

"On the flip side, they're not waiting for us. They're nowhere near expecting us. Best I know, the strongest enemy they faced down was Amaria, and we're both a cut above her. And remember what they did to Charlotte."

 

Laura's face darkened once again and her fingers found their nasty grip on the Tropius's neck. There was no way in hell that she would let them get away with that. And with Saphira, they were going to utterly crush these bastards.

 

 

*

 

 

It was a room dug deep in the mountain. It could have been a control center once, but at this point it clearly wasn't in control any more. The monitors and machinery in the room had, in spite of increasingly haphazard repairs, ceased to function since long, their components vanished or chaotically switched around. Many wires were hanging in the air, their copper uncoated. The floor was scattered with shards of broken glass, mostly from the monitors.

 

Three men and two Pokemon were currently in the room. One man had a square face, with dark hair, and with his eyepatch he always looked upset and angry. Another was blond with broad shoulders, and his softer face still had a puzzled frown. The third one was focused, almost clinical. In order, they were Sirius, the ruthless Team Meteor executive, Connal, the Reborn psychiatrist (officially suspended), and the exceedingly bizarre ZEL.

 

One Abra, the focus of everyone's attentions, was sitting in the center of the room in a rather unnatural mechanical contraption that was half-exoskeleton, half-iron maiden. Behind it, in a corner of the room, Lumi's Espeon was shivering and panting. Its purpose was to deflect the excess psychic power leaked by the Abra. It was a task not unlike trying to prevent a torrent from running while tiptoeing on a sharp rock in the middle of said torrent. The exhausted psychic Pokemon was trying its best, but it was not up to the job by far. 

 

The rationale was to avoid drawing too much attention to their activities while the PULSE Abra was working. So much psychic power, leaking in nature, would have some very noticeable effects on the surroundings, and it would be very, very slow to disappear. But, obviously, they had underestimated the extent and volatility of the leaks. 

 

There was a rushed knock at the door.

 

"Commander!" a Meteor said in a panicked voice.

 

Sirius, cursing under his breath about unnecessary distractions, went to meet his subordinate.

 

"There's an intruder coming our way."

 

"Then stand prepared to defend the base. We're busy. Remember that Lin is coming soon, and that she will not appreciate your failure."

 

"Yessir. But..." the grunt hesitated visibly. "Ricardo, after he saw her on the monitors -- the intruder, I mean -- went wild and rushed straight for the emergency exit."

 

"You did apprehend him, I hope." Sirius replied, his voice harder. He could see his surbordinate get more and more tense, and that did not bode well for anyone.

 

"Yes, but..."

 

Sirius didn't hear the rest of the sentence because his interlocutor vanished.

 

"What the fuck is wrong with this Espeon?" he asked angrily, turning back.

 

The Espeon, it turned out, couldn't hold out any more and had given in, lying on the ground, moaning. Sigmund was now attempting a rather complex examination of the Abra. It was perhaps the thirtieth time he was doing it in three days, on thirty different Abras, all bred to be usable by the machine, and the repetition on such a tight schedule wasn't really making him improve his technique. When the psychic power was free to run, the Abra went wild with it. The Doctor and Eve attempted to have the amplified Pokemon control it, but to little avail, even though Eve had believed it possible, and the Doctor's goal was to understand the Abra so as to convince it of doing it.

 

"It's never going to work, is it?" Sirius asked ZEL. He was irritated, and worried. He was thinking of Lin, whose version of a Performance Improvement Plan was a lot more painful, physically and morally -- and, at unpredictable times, deadly.

 

"This seems the most probably outcome." Eve answered. "I advocate termina--"

 

ZEL vanished.

 

"I warned them that the Pokemon could grasp the outline of their thoughts." Connal said, turning to Sirius, a little bit smug to be vindicated. When had he allowed himself to feel again? he wondered. Then again, it felt so good -- why had he even stopped in the first place?

 

But if the Abra experiment didn't work out, Sirius thought, they would still need to keep Plan A. It meant finding the keys, and keeping those they had. It had been necessary to put the keys in a safe far from the room where PULSE Abras were tamed. But if there were intruders in the base... especially the meddlesome ones that had no business in getting away with way too many victories, however small...

 

Sirius started to rush towards the precious safe where he had stored the Ruby Ring and the Amethyst Pendant. He lost his balance when an explosion shook the entire base.

 

 

*

 

 

"Good job, Naganadel." Saphira said, even though she was sure that, in the din caused by the echoes of the original explosion of molten metal, various alarms, and the terrified screams of everyone else, no one could hear it. She herself couldn't.

 

Five enemies in the anteroom, the old enforcer took over her thought processes. Two wounded, one severe. Others look shocked. Three ways to the room.

 

I have to get out.

 

"Gant," she shouted over the radio. Simple names worked best. "Muk."

 

That was the signal to Laura, who was waiting a couple of minutes away from there. I'm in the place, it meant, and I'm going to wreck it some more. You can go follow me now.

 

"Nite." the answer came. "Got it."

 

Saphira noted that the lightly wounded grunt was escaping with a shaky pace with horror written all over his face. The other one was kneeling, her entire face contorted in pain, with a large piece of hot metal stuck in her flesh at collarbone level. The wound was five centimeters long and bleeding. One way or another, she wasn't going to be a threat. The other enemies had sent out a few Pokemon.

 

Pathetic, she thought, assessing them with only a glance. Why hadn't Ame sent for her from the very beginning?

 

A single, nasty Sludge Wave from the Naganadel struck squarely every enemy Pokemon in the room, taking them out in one shot, and her enemies' eyes widened in panicked horror.

 

Saphira glared at them. The Naganadel's second Sludge Wave, a much less harsh one, missed one of their heads by a few centimeters only. They ran.

 

Saphira went forward, faithful to her self-assigned goal. She was to wreck the base and lure everyone else to her, to keep them distracted, or, better, incapacitated. And she would be better off in a corridor than in a room where enemies had many more alleys to attack her.

 

Indeed, a new, bigger wave of hostiles came running at her from every direction, but their gaits, their very faces made it obvious that they were afraid. Excellent.

 

Let the fuckers learn.

 

"I am Saphira Belrose," she exclaimed in a loud and clear voice. They had certainly figured it out, or would piece it out anyway, but the knowledge wouldn't help them, only make them more afraid. "And you pieces of shit thought you could get away with kidnapping my sister?"

 

"Dragonite." she said. If tones could kill, the venom in hers could have set off the Great Fire of Wyndon.

 

With terrifying speed, the bulky dragon grabbed a random grunt by the throat and began squeezing.

 

"I want to know where are the Pokemon you stole from my sister."

 

The Dragonite lifted the grunt, just enough for him to start kicking and thrashing in his desperate attempts to touch the ground.

 

"We'll never tell you, bitch." someone snarled.

 

"Wrong." Saphira said flatly.

 

The Naganadel shot a mouthful of fire in the direction of the speaker, and the Meteors scattered frantically. The fire exploded on contact with the metal ground, and the projections hit two of the grunts, shrieking in pain as the glowing metal pierced their flesh.

 

"Where are the Pokemon?" Saphira ordered.

 

In the terrorized silence where the Meteors, stuck between two deadly, almost primal fears -- Saphira on one side, their boss on the other -- Saphira felt something moving near her. Answering her silent request, the Naganadel shot a Dragon Pulse at the ceiling above the Meteors before her, to their terror.

 

A second later, a Seviper was lying, fainted, amidst the crumbs of a collapsed chunk of the ceiling. So someone was playing dirty, Saphira thought. She almost smirked. What a wannabe.

 

"Please..." the strangled grunt stammered weakly. "I'll... tell..."

 

A hand gesture from Saphira, and the Dragonite released the pressure, letting the man stand with a somewhat shaky balance.

 

"There was no point in keeping the Pokemon, and we couldn't use them ourselves." Why did she feel... colder? "So they decided to auc...t..."

 

Saphira saw the Chandelure slowly appear again, possessing the man's body, exorcising his soul. But it wasn't done yet. The Dragonite grabbed energetically the man and pulled him out of the Ghost Pokemon's deadly reach.

 

She saw, hidden behind his men, someone with an eye patch who looked at her and the reluctant turncoat with cold hatred.

 

Two seconds later, between her and the shaking Eye-Patch, there only was an exhausted husk of a Candelure, and half a dozen lying grunts in cortorted agony, screaming at the extensive acid burns on their brick-red legs through their uniform's cheap trousers, now useless from all the acid that had eaten at them.

 

That'll teach them to fear this son of a bitch over me.

 

"They'll be auctioning them on Seventh Street sometime soon." the Meteor managed to whisper to Saphira. "Thank you."

 

"Get away from me." she spat in disgust. "Hide wherever you want here. If you ever mess with me or my sisters again, I'll kill you."

 

And then she ran after Eye-Patch, whose cruelty Charlotte and Noel had graphically described for her. She would end him. But not right now. His desperate flight sent them all around the base, and that gave her more than a few opportunities to chastise Meteor grunts. Additionally, it let her destroy the place some more, which would give Laura an easier time to search.

 

 

Sirius was running from Saphira in a blind, terrified panic, a dread that was ready to do anything just to live for one more second. And he hadn't even recovered the keys...

 

 

 

*

 

 

When the base started to shake due to the explosions, Dr. Sigmund Connal locked himself in the PULSE room and started to promise everything and pledge anything to the one entity he thought (not without reason) could protect him from whichever horrific brute was wrecking the place -- namely, the Abra.

 

 

*

 

 

Laura realized, not without apprehension or a certain horror, the devastation that Saphira had wrought upon their enemy's grounds. But what disturbed her was how empty she felt. She knew she ought to feel satisfied, avenged, amidst the starts of electrical fires, the small fumes, the flickering lights, the debris everywhere, the naked wiring hanging, the screams ahead.

 

"Came to gloat, have you?"

 

The voice was raw, its tone sick, desperate, accusatory. The sentence came from a Meteor grunt knelt beside another one, his bloody hands near the lying person's neck. Laura heard a strained breathing.

 

That's what these bastards deserve, the voice of anger said.

 

Laura felt the incredulous weight of the critical inner silence following this statement.

 

That was not who she was, she decided.

 

She took a Breloom and a Lilligant out, just in case there were more enemies coming, and then knelt near the wounded Meteor grunt, who was lying on her back, whimpering in pain, blood visibly flowing from her naked collarbone wound. The unharmed Meteor's hands were red, trying to mitigate the bleeding, but not very successful, judging from the clothing and the blood stains around.

 

She wanted to speak properly, but she noted that the lying woman was very pale. She didn't have much time.

 

"What happened to her?" Laura asked.

 

"As if you didn't know." the other grunt sneered, his voice indignant and hollow.

 

"I just set foot here." Laura replied.

 

Why was she wasting time with him? She should find the Pokemon already!

 

Shut up, she ordered her most goal-oriented part. I'm trying to do good here.

 

"But it could have been my sister." she added, feeling a slight unease at the idea that Saphira could have done this deliberately.

 

It wasn't as if she didn't know. But there was a difference between knowing it, and seeing the people it really happened to. Right now, she couldn't bring herself to care about what the woman had done. She just saw a person in pain.

 

"Your sister..." the grunt stared at her, then had a hiccup that could have been a single, tearless sob. "You're one of Charlotte's older sisters, aren't you?"

 

"We don't have time to chat!" Laura replied, slightly annoyed at the change of topic, and uneasy with being linked to that story before she was comfortable claiming it out loud. "What happened to her?"

 

"I don't know. I found her with a piece of hot metal right there." he pointed at the wound. "So I took it out and have tried to stop the bleeding."

 

"You shouldn't have touched the metal." Laura sighed. "It put pressure on the wound, stopped the blood flow."

 

Then she ripped clothing from the woman's uniform, going for the easiest, her sleeves. The change in position made the Meteor grunt moan in pain, and her strained breathing seemed to get weaker.

 

"What are you doing?"

 

"As you see, I'm using several layers of cloth to put more pressure on the wound, to help the blood clot. We're almost out of time and... she's in shock, of course." Laura winced in realization. "The little fumes and wires don't help. Don't you have medics or something?"

 

"You're the ones who put her in this situation!" the grunt protested. "But... I thought we had some." he admitted sadly, watching Laura decidely press his partner's collarbone over the three layers of cloth. "Solaris wouldn't have stood for that, sure. Taka too, but he's a softy anyway. But I guess it's different now. They wouldn't have stood for what the boss told to do to your sister, either."

 

At that moment, the woman visibly started to struggle to breathe.

 

"Simon..." she managed to articulate. "I'm... so..."

 

"Tara!" Simon took her hand and his entire body shook at how weak Tara's grasp felt. "Please..."

 

Simon and Tara. Laura realized. What were the odds?  

 

 

 

Player's note:

 

Spoiler

So. The Sigmund battle.

 

 

The plan is simple: the Doctor's team has mostly Psychic types, so it's a harmless set-up sweep. Well, Elidee sets up behind screens because Musharna hits hard and Psyshock targets her weak (and unboosted) physical defences.

 

 

Now, Musharna isn't going for an attacking move... I hope.

 

 

Okay, that should be manageable. What's the bonus on damage again? Like 1.3 or something like that? And anyway, it'll use Dazzling Gleam on Tech, right?

 

 

Oh. Oops. Change of plans, since Elidee has a great match-up against much of the enemy team.

 

 

Safe switch into Callan who has a stab super effective move.

 

 

Well, now Callan has to tank a hit. I'm not sure that it would have killed with full EVs in Attack (as opposed to 170-ish?).

 

 

It doesn't hurt too much though. Let's thank the Light Screen.

 

 

This is fine, but Electivire hurts a bit, so we'll Intimidate him...

 

 

Further attack reduction... It didn't register that this was a priority move and thus the Psychic Terrain would negate it.

 

 

Well, not great, but nothing that an Intimidate won't solve, right?

 

 

Ah. This might be an issue, then.

 

 

The Electivire re-used Meditate and Mouse did chip damage. Now Callan's Earthquake should kill.

 

 

Thunder Punch is now a one-shot, so I send out Tech for the Reflect.

 

 

I also gave a little more damage with Fake Out. The damage is one single Thunder Punch through Reflect.

 

 

Now this should be enough...

 

 

Except not. I do not remember what happened, but it's likely that Electivire outsped and killed.

 

 

So it's a little tricky. Stoutland, Meowstic, Krookodile are down, Blaziken and Ribombee are weak... this is not going well, all the more so since the last party member (which I actually can't remember) isn't very effective against the team. And A-Raichu can set up.

 

Oh well.

 

 

First step is healing Ribombee. Sorry, Leaf. It's really good that the AI didn't try to set up there.

 

 

Say goodbye, Raichu.

 

 

But this one isn't a kill, and Rotom is strong enough for a critical hit to make me lose.

 

 

This doesn't happen, though, fortunately, and Elidee lives to claim another victory.

 

 

And now it's clean-up time.

 

 

 

Oops. Sorry for the pollen, it'd be a shame if anyone had allergic reactions...

 

 

*****

 

So, can I manage this battle a bit more cleanly? Let's see!

 

 

 

 

This starts as usual. But I set up Reflect in anticipation of the Electivire. Tech took a Psyshock in the meantime.

 

 

Then it's time for a mostly safe switch, as Psyshock is stronger for Musharna than Dazzling Gleam in the Psychic Terrain.

 

 

Musharna is bulky and will not go down without an attack.

 

 

But the damage is manageable thanks to the Light Screen.

 

 

Uh oh.

 

 

Never mind, actually.

 

 

Callan does little against Drampa, but Elidee is very useful.

 

 

For this type of thing, really.

 

 

Reflect is off, too.

 

 

Take that!

 

 

Sigmund sends Rotom next, and Elidee is not sturdy enough to be switched around on her timing, and she's not strong enough to kill the Rotom (she's low enough to be killed in one shot through the SpDef raise). Unless there's a crit, she's finished. And there wasn't one.

 

 

Fun fact: Tech is insanely fast. Prankster doesn't even matter most of the time.

 

 

Raichu has a good SpAtk and a set-up move. It shouldn't be underestimated. So I ready my defenses.

 

 

This is bad...

 

 

Or not, as it happens.

 

 

Connal's last mon has a clear type disadvantage...

 

 

But despite its not inconsiderable bulk, it cannot beat Callan through the Light Screen (a crit would have helped, but there are enough team members to finish it off).

 

 

*****

 

 

And for the return of the very own Reborn Knave, Sirius. He's always a threat to be reckoned with. His Chandelure wrought hell on my team in my first playthrough (I remember using Swampert, Scrafty, Stoutland, Ampharos, dual screens Meowstic and I remember needing X items after dozens of resets and revives and...). But now that I have a damage calculator and an EV-trained team, is he that dangerous?

 

(You'll notice that Pokemon levels are a bit high. It's because I transferred them in this alternate save file with a Shared PC mod. I was not going to spend time grinding again).

 

(You may also notice that the images are different. This is because my cropping script didn't work as expected, although it worked the previous time, so I'm not sure what mistake I made. I hope it is not too bothersome.)

 

 

I lead Ampharos against the special Minior for an obvious reason.

 

 

Ampharos doesn't outspeed, but with sufficient EV investment Discharge is a OHKO.

 

 

Sirius sends out Tyrantrum, and I switch Elidee in on the rather weak Earthquake. A single Dazzling Gleam isn't able to kill, so I need a little boost.

 

 

And there it is. Indeed.

 

 

But Elidee has done her job, and it is with great reluctance that I decide to let her perish to ensure a safer switch-in to a teammate, namely, Intimidate Krookodile.

 

 

With sufficient EVs Krookodile outspeeds and one-shots with Earthquake.

 

 

But Callan doesn't fare well against Golisopod. Surely a robust Pokemon such as Klinklang will do better, right?

 

 

It's not useless, but it's still pretty weak, alas.

 

 

Golisopod gets full para'd the next turn, allowing Klinklang to deliver a Discharge that forces Emergency Exit to activate, and Sirius sensibly chooses to send out Chandelure.

 

 

And obviously Antum cannot hold its own in this duel.

 

 

But Krookodile has enough EVs to outspeed and one-shot with Earthquake (Crunch wouldn't, however. I forgot for a while that Earthquake was also a super-effective move).

 

 

I switch in Mouse on the Golisopod to Intimidate it. Note the surprising amount of damage done by First Impression through the Intimidate.

 

 

And that thing is bulky: the Strength hadn't killed it, and it tried to get off a priority move but it got full para'd instead at the next turn. But its demise was inevitable.

 

 

Stoutland has done her job -- I can let her rest if she weakens the Toucannon (not that it's strictly necessary).

 

 

I even tried a Fire Fang, see if I could get the burn -- but I didn't. Never mind.

 

 

With that many HP, Toucannon cannot resist a Discharge.

 

 

I won, just as planned. Take that, you infernal simulacrum of a human being. 

 

 

 

[Evi Crystal]

Omg... This was graphic, even if its not so in explicitly..  Oh just wow...

 

But I wouldn't be suprised about Saphira's rampage in Tazan Meteor Base, but christ Mindlack... That was crazy as high hell. 

 

Spoiler

14 hours ago, Mindlack said:

Laura didn't know it in as many words, but Saphira had been an enforcer for one of the major Reborn City gangs in the first two years after she left the Orphanage. In this world, fighting wasn't about silly, proper Gym challenges, but brutal brawls where caring about 'rules' was one way among many to end up as hostage, prisoner, loot, or corpse. Everyone had learnt the hard way to beware her flaring temper backed up by an almost unrivalled fighting skill, and the same implacable fury had mowed down her own employers when she witnessed them doing something she would not condone.

Saphira. Oh sweet Saphira Belrose... You're not the only one who's in such familiar position (as we heard Ricardo's story as well), although it was mostly the orphanage. It feels like all options are terrible with little choice to adapt with dystopia.

 

14 hours ago, Mindlack said:

"Imagine what they did to everyone." Saphira went on. "How many children lost their parents, how many parents lost their children. Of the surviving families, how many of their dreams were eaten by the corrupted water, uprooted by the plants. Think of Heather's pain about Corey."

 

14 hours ago, Mindlack said:

The house, Saphira had reasoned, wasn't safe. It stood out too much in the surrounding emptiness, it was too close to the city, where it was recorded that it had burnt a decade ago. Not to mention the effect that it had on Charlotte, who was always hesitant to touch anything, as if she still expected it to catch fire.

(In spoilers because they are readers that aren't to far as on my level of chapter. If you understand what I man)

This is just how horrible the aftermath of a destructive decade of pain and despair has left scars so deep in the whole region. It's like feeling trapped in eternal despair without hope. Even if you fight in determination if they are still scars both emotional and physical- inside every suffering person.

 

It upsets me more than anything with the characters

 

[Aphelli]

12 hours ago, Evi Crystal said:

Omg... This was graphic, even if its not so in explicitly..  Oh just wow...

 

But I wouldn't be suprised about Saphira's rampage in Tazan Meteor Base, but christ Mindlack... That was crazy as high hell. 

 

I'm not sure whether this means I nailed it or if I went past the line.

 

Spoiler

But yes, Saphira means business here. I decided to make her more competent than canon  -- just as ruthless, powerful and otherwise terrifying, but more in control (although still with severe issues). I think I've written lately about how even Ame wasn't treading lightly around her.

 

 

 

12 hours ago, Evi Crystal said:

(In spoilers because they are readers that aren't to far as on my level of chapter. If you understand what I man)

 

No, I can't think of anyone you might be referring to. It would be such a shame for such a nonexistant sweet reader to learn before the right time that Gabriel is actually Lin deep undercover.

 

Uh, oops. Just forget it, okay? It'll make sense in time.

 

12 hours ago, Evi Crystal said:

  Hide contents

Saphira. Oh sweet Saphira Belrose... You're not the only one who's in such familiar position (as we heard Ricardo's story as well), although it was mostly the orphanage. It feels like all options are terrible with little choice to adapt with dystopia.

 

This is just how horrible the aftermath of a destructive decade of pain and despair has left scars so deep in the whole region. It's like feeling trapped in eternal despair without hope. Even if you fight in determination if they are still scars both emotional and physical- inside every suffering person.

 

It upsets me more than anything with the characters

 

I agree, and that's really sad. A city as messed-up as Reborn cannot really produce healthy individuals (even discounting the fact that healthy characters are boring anyway^^). And it's hard for such people to manage to pull themselves by their bootstraps (since it's all they have left) and improve themselves and/or environment. Saphira managed it, somewhat, while Ricardo didn't.

 

Spoiler

For the Saphira quote, she's trying to make Laura angry to forget about her apprehension (a reckless tactic, to be frank), so that justifies the appeal to emotion and the emphasis. Otherwise, I doubt that she'd really express herself that way.

 

Also, I have another plan hinging on this idea, designed to hurt Gabriel... (evil laugh)

 

 

 

 

On a different note, I'm about an hour too late, but I can still wish The Odd One Out a happy second birthday!

To this day, the fic's primary word count is about 198,000 words, not including the quotes, the character rates, or the player's notes, which is close to the word count of Deathly Hallows (and larger than Half-Blood Prince or Goblet of Fire).

Of course, word count is not an objective in itself -- but I find that it helps showcase the progress I made.

I tried to make the fic (without the pictures yet, and it's very rushed) into a tex file (I don't want to try and check if word can handle it). There are lots of issues with margins, line breaks, blank pages, and so on. But regardless, the pdf has 398 pages (I would guess that it's closer to 350 pages of real text and the rest is motstly blank decoration, though, but still).

 

So I've been a little less productive than last year, perhaps on account of having a slightly busier life, a huge break with proportionate drought of inspiration at the beginning of this year, and a muse that might be playing hard-to-get a little more. But what has increased by more than 100 percent since last year is your presence. Yes, you. If my count is correct, a year ago, there were 59 comments for 36 chapters and around 6k views. Now, there are 153 posts and above 18.5k views, which is a lot of progress!

 

So thank you for reading, for reacting, for commenting, and please keep doing so (or consider starting to do so if you have been lurking so far)! If I've been able to write so far (something I certainly wasn't sure about when I started), it's also thanks to you.

 

 

And -- who knows where we'll be next year?

 

 

(one thing still hasn’t changed though – I should try and take some time to review and rework my older chapters, but I’m scared to look at my old writing). 

[Candy]

On 10/2/2021 at 10:51 AM, Mindlack said:

Is there a reference I'm unaware of? 

 

it's just this but replacing "car" 

Spoiler

 

 

[Aphelli]

On 10/17/2021 at 9:56 AM, Candy said:

it's just this but replacing "car" 

 

I see, thank you for expanding my terribly limited internet culture.

 

I hope you're all doing well.

Time for the next episode! Hope you'll enjoy. 

 

 

Chapter 60: Change of Plans

 

 

Spoiler

As far as she could remember, Saphira had never really enjoyed confrontations in her childhood. Pokemon battles in good fun were one thing, but real conflict made her thoroughly uncomfortable. But she had spent years in an Orphanage where neither the adults nor the children were particularly kind to her, even less to her younger and weaker sisters. So she had had to step up to the role of their defender.

 

It had happened far more easily than she could have expected. One day she was taking abuse... and seconds later she was berserk with unleashed anger, going for the terrified ex-bully's throat, so driven that she had had to be sedated. And even then, as the bully had sneered at her as she was enduring mandatory medicated rest, she had snapped. That boy's leg would always be fragile afterwards.

 

No one had tried to bully Saphira or her sisters after that. And that same rage, then fuelled by her failed attempt at claiming guardianship for her sisters, tore through the Reborn criminal ecosystem and secured a position at the top for the gang that employed her -- until she decided to wipe them out too.

 

So Saphira was having a field day inside the Meteor base. Wherever the increasingly desperate Sirius was fleeing, she was following him, plowing through what he might have thought were clever traps, her Dragonite and Naganadel driven by their Trainer's unrestrained wrath to wreck the structure they were in and incapacitate any hostiles, delivering with equal dedication arbitrary levels of pain, from scares to concussions and compound fractures, very possibly internal bleedings as well, although they refrained from outright murder.

 

Better wound than kill, Saphira remembered. Better terrify into inaction than hurt. But better killed than active and hostile.

 

Eventually, Sirius, out of breath and panicked out of his mind, tripping regularly over the debris, out of Pokemon -- he wasn't that shoddy a battler, Saphira was simply out of his league -- went to seek shelter in the room where Sigmund had locked himself in to worship the PULSE Abra. Sirius was in charge of the station, so he could override Sigmund's lock and shut himself in as well.

 

"It's a disaster." he muttered for himself more than for anyone else.

 

The door exploded inwards, adding molten metal to the debris in the room, and Saphira surged ahead. She quickly scanned her surroundings, and her eyes narrowed at the sight of the doctor.

 

Sigmund, however dazed and shocked at the attack, recognized the general shape of the assaillant, her gait, and probably some tiny details that he wasn't even consciously noticing. The information formed in his mind a coherent picture of what was about to happen. Were he a lesser mortal, less trained in the art of self-control so necessary to a psychiatrist, he might have pissed himself, just by listening to his screaming inner voices of dread.

 

All he permitted himself to acknowledge was his dominant state of mind, which could be summed up thusly: oh, shit.

 

 

*

 

"What's this?" Laura asked, worried at what Simon had just given Tara.

 

"Don't ask." Simon grunted sadly. "You said she just needed to pull through until the people who knew what they were doing started helping her for real. So that'll make her hold on, fine."

 

Laura eyed the woman whom they had slightly moved into the recovery position. Exhausted, wounded, shocked, at best she should have been dozing off, saving her strength. But with that blissful expression on her face...

 

"Is that a drug?" Laura tried to keep her tone neutral as she guessed the meaning of the content expression on Tara's face, in spite of how utterly stupid it sounded.

 

"It'll give her the strength to hold on." Simon replied drily. "It won't be bad for her if it's just this one time. I don't want to lose her too."

 

He glanced at Laura's utter failure of a poker face, whose disapproval was obvious.

 

"Do you know what it's like to lose someone? To watch their agony? To watch them die? It's a shitty situation Tara's in, but I'm not letting her go down that road."

"My home burnt when I was a child. And my parents burnt to death inside it." Laura replied heatedly. "Was that what you thought of Charlotte too? She's in a shitty situation, but let's drug her and it'll be alright." she added scathingly.

"No." Simon protested with a disgusted face. "Of course not. If you really want to know, Tara and I volunteered to be her baby-sitters to protect her from the other thugs in Team Meteor!"

"Such a sweetheart." Laura spat, the anger coming back, tainted with almost unbearable contempt.

"They brought me in by promising a better world. I had no idea we'd end up doing that kind of things. It's disgusting, but when we succeed -- the world will be reset. Improved. And all the bad stuff we did to bring it about won't even have existed."

"Charlotte said you felt this way." Laura commented with a certain disgust. Then she shut her eyes, trying to follow the idea that had coursed through her mind. "But if your bosses view you as fodder now... why would they honor their pledge then?"

 

Simon opened his mouth, and then shut it. He looked down at Tara. He shuddered at the moan of pain that his colleagues in the nearby corridor emitted, writhing on the ground as if they were possessed. Laura didn't seem to notice. Nobody had come for them. Only he had come for Tara.

 

Simon blanched as he fought not to comprehend the full meaning of Laura's words, to refuse that what they entailed could be true. All this... for what?

 

And then a young, anxious male voice resounded on Laura's radio:

 

"Saphira? We have a problem."

 

 

 

*

 

 

Between Ciel's Noivern, her Oricorio, her Gliscor, her Togekiss, and her Mega Altaria, there were enough flying Pokemon for every child, provided that Anna was with Ciel. And given Anna's unstable health state, it was best, should she be transported, that she wore a large, warm winter coat and a blanket; moreover, Ciel herself and the Altaria's fluffy fur also helped keep the ill girl warm. Everyone else too had an additional layer of improvised protection against the cold air, cloth or blanket.

 

Heather had chosen the Noivern. Not exactly chosen, per se, but the dragon looked more energetic than its teammates and that had tended to scare the other children off. Heather, not so much, be it for her practise with her mother's Elite Four mons or a general dulling of emotion after the tragedies that had recently befallen her.

 

The squad's flight was straightforward, since neither Ciel nor the children wanted to make the trip longer. Except for Heather. She flew irregularly, sometimes ahead of the others, sometimes behind them, sometimes above them, sometimes beneath them. Almost absently, she was acting as though she were rehearsing for a stunt flying show. She was making the Noivern speed up and suddenly stop, soar and start nosediving, and, a couple of times, tried for a looping or a tailspin.

 

They swiftly flew past the Tanzan Mountains and found themselves in a wide empty valley with uninterrupted forests on their border, and merely tall wide herbs in the middle, with some sparser trees. That place was known as Route 1, and was, once upon a time, thriving with Trainers trying to improve themselves.

 

Behind them, at the western edge of the route, stood the ancient Grand Gates of Reborn City, atop the Grand Stairway, unkempt and dysfunctional. While the Gates were facing north, the route ended abruptly westwards, as a cliff overhanging the Lapis Ward.

 

Ahead of them, at the eastern end of Route 1, they could see the large Vanhanen Castle and the majestic plant labyrinth that surrounded it, but it appeared to them as a toy house surrounded by toy grass, nearby a little crack in the ground, the euphimistically named Iolia Valley, a narrow ravine of caves and colorful crystals, a swift torrent running at its bottom.

 

They flew over Agate City, and followed the gaps in the mountain ranges so as not to be too cold. But it wasn't a surprise that the ground kept getting higher and higher, so they were, in effect, flying at lower and lower altitude. After over an hour in the air, of sheer delight for Heather, and controlled unease for everyone else (Ciel liked flying as much as any good Flying-type Gym Leader, but not really in these conditions), they began landing on Calcenon.

 

It started as a little heartache to Heather when she looked at Calcenon. Everything was so small, seen from the air, so narrow, so locked-up. She envisioned herself living there, with other people, older than she was. She remembered Saphira and how Laura, Charlotte and everyone else obeyed her to the letter. She would just be trading a jail for another. That was all she had now.

 

Everyone but her was headed towards the ground. And she didn't have much choice than follow them. She had missed flying so much. She wasn't getting her Pokemon back, too. What a shame. But at least she could enjoy the Noivern just a little bit more, and have a last bit of fun by landing as fast as she dared.

 

But she had so little time. Everyone else was already close to the ground, slowing down as much as they could so that the landing would be utterly unnoticeable... She had just the time for one good nosedive.

 

"Heather," Shelly called, anguished, from the ground, "what are you doing?"

 

And, the cold, humid wind of altitude burning her face and hurling at her ears, a feeling she relished, Heather realized that she had another choice. One that Gabriel would have dubbed the Wronski Feint, not of course that she knew it. So, instead of crashing on the ground, Heather flew up a couple of meters before the crash and laughed delightedly at the sensation of defying gravity, of, for the briefest instant, feeling pulled upwards by the acceleration needed to pull this fake-out landing off.

 

"Heather!" Shelly called.

 

When Ciel, still carrying Anna as Charlotte was looking for the key that Saphira had given her, realized what the red-haired girl was doing, it was already too late. She was flying away, and Ciel didn't dare abandon her sick charge to pursue Heather. Besides, the Noivern was hers: it wouldn't go far.

 

"Togekiss, Minior," Ciel ordered, "go find her and try to make her come back."

 

Mega Altaria would have been her best bet, but it was impossible to let it so far away from her.

 

 

 

*

 

 

"Cain?" Laura asked anxiously. Saphira had told her not to use proper names, but since Cain wasn't doing it and her bigger sister wasn't correcting him...

"Laura? Where's Saphira?" Cain asked.

 

Laura glanced around her. Simon was pretending not to pay attention to her, but, since she couldn't find a volume button on the communicator, he was bound to be listening. The rest of the base was very quiet. Perhaps Saphira had managed to destroy everything? But then again, she would have called on the radio. Really, Saphira would have called on the radio regardless. Laura really needed to get going. But she had to hear Cain's report beforehand, of course.

 

"Well, the trip happened well, except that Heather flew off." Cain explained. "Ciel put Anna to bed and everyone else is watching her, and then she went looking for Heather. She can't be too far, but we don't know where yet. I want to go look for her too."

 

 Right... Since Saphira hadn't reacted, her radio had to be in trouble. So Laura had to give an answer by herself.

 

"Stay here for a couple of hours. Calcenon isn't next door, so it won't matter much. And this way Ciel'll be able to tell you what she found. I need to get going." she decided. "Over." she added, reminded of the proper codeword.

"Who's Heather?" Simon asked, holding Tara's hand.

 

The young woman looked stable. At least I did something good, Laura was telling herself, but what could have happened to Saphira? Did I spend time I couldn't afford?

 

"She's one of the girls that you kidnapped." Laura retorted curtly. "The ten-year-old redhead."

"The pale one? Who never responded to anything?"

"Very likely, yes." Laura answered, her tone irritated. "Speaking of which, do you know where their Pokemon are?"

"What were we going to do with them?" Simon smirked joylessly, his voice soft. "There was a freaking Thundurus in there! Sirius ordered to sell them on the black market."

 

Laura felt that her heart was about to stop. The idea that all these Pokemon would be forcefully given to the kind of scum that would buy them illegally sickened her. It saddened her for Charlotte, too. There was no way her sister, or Noel, or Anna could get them back, now.

 

"Don't look like that, there are certainly some better mons out there."

"These Pokemon," Laura answered disgustedly, "come either from their dead parents or their own effort as a child. But I understand there's little point complaining. Second shot: you took jewelry from the children. Where is it?"

"Seriously? You came all here for these trinkets that the boss took? But yeah, it was a new low for him."

"Well, the goal was to actually teach you to never mess with Charlotte again." Laura answered.

 

There was the sound of a shock as Laura's Breloom punched and shoved into the wall an approaching grunt's Pokemon. Simon looked at the Breloom, and wonderingly at Laura. Her tone was very peculiar, more like a schoolgirl telling a lesson than someone wounded that made a threat. Not that it was close to either.

 

"I have no idea what the boss did all that for. But that was wrong. I know he has a safe somewhere in the base." he indicated vaguely a direction. "But I have no idea if your things will still be in there. For all I know, he could have sold them on the black market too. You better go."

 

"Simon, what the hell are you doing?" another Meteor grunt shouted, seeing him chatting peacefully to Laura.

 

Simon got up, and glanced at Laura, who herself was standing up and ready to go.

 

"She helped me save Tara, while you were cowering in your own rathole!" he started shouting.

 

And so Lara left, letting the two grunts scream at each others' throat. She had a mission to complete.

 

 

 

*

 

 

Do not prepare the base for a surprise assault: bad.

Do not keep the keys at hand in case of a surprise assault: very bad.

Let the Abra teleport ZEL who knew where: probably pretty bad too.

Get the Abra to get rid of Saphira: good.

 

But now Lin was coming, Saphira was probably still not far, the Abra was acting up worse than usual, there was another intruder in the base, albeit a far milder one, as far as he understood, and Sirius was unable to leave the room.

 

The PULSE Abra was toying with him, teleporting him away as soon as he reached closer to the door, sometimes even tripping him by teleporting him mid-step. He had tried using his own Pokemon, at least those that hadn't met Saphira, to free him, but the Abra could fling them around too, deflect their attacks and, due to its mechanical enhancements, it could easily shrug off what it didn't entirely catch.

 

Sirius was sure that, even though that blasted Doctor should be watching the Abra instead, Connal was watching his futile attempts with great interest and a certain vindication. Oh, his revenge would be frightful.

 

In the new world, he was going to suffer a long, excruciating, and hopefully very satisfying death.

 

 

 

*

 

 

It was the tenth small, shoddy, spartan room that Laura was checking out, and there still wasn't a safe in there. She had battled her fair share of pointlessly zealous and disappointingly untrained grunts and used Saphira's lessons in anger to make them get out of her way after her Lilligant thrashed her enemies, while the Breloom was watching her back.

 

She had barged into smelly dorm rooms that apparently had way too many people for health or comfort, labs furnished with worn machines and some more exotic contraptions that still looked like they had been engineered in somebody's backyard, storage rooms filled with crates that seemed to only contain random junk, a couple of (fortunately empty) bathrooms. She didn't walk down some stairs leading to a "power center" that apparently had to be sealed shut at all times, assessing it as a more dangerous place where a safe had no reason to be. 

 

The labs weren't unoccupied, but the people in there had been usually most accomodating and willing to let her frisk the room instead of destroy its contents. But none of them had known anything about Sirius's fixation for jewelry stolen from orphaned children or wanted to say anything about his safe. But it didn't matter, really. Simon had indicated that the safe was roughly in these parts, so she was bound to find it one way or another.

 

"Gant." she heard her sister's voice on the radio, which relieved her from a worry she hadn't realized was gnawing at her so much. "Can you hear me?" 

"Nite." Laura acknowledged, relieved. "I can hear you. Where are you?"

"On my way back." Saphira replied, her voice rushed. "They got a mechanical Abra or something, maybe that's what they called a PULSE. It teleported me in a cave somewhere out of the range. What's on your end?"

"First priority," Laura replied, remembering the conventions Saphira had set, "is impossible. The targets are no longer here. I'm looking for the other stuff right now. It could be in a safe somewhere. Did you hear what Cain--"

"No proper names, Gant." Saphira cut her off.

"What Princess, right, said about the flock?"

"No. What happened?"

"Four out of five got there fine, but, er... Ruby decided to fly her own way. They're looking for her right now."

 

Saphira cursed.

 

"Okay. That'll have to wait. While I'm coming back, I want you to cut their power. I can't sneak up on the Abra and I suspect that neither can you, but take away the power and there shouldn't be any issue any more."

"Got it, Nite."

"I'm coming soon, Gant. Over."

 

 

 

 

*

 

 

 

I had busied myself after my resounding defeat at Bennett's hand. But first, foremost, I had to think, to understand the reasons of my failure. And it came to mind that since Florinia that I had flattened, my Gym battles had always been pretty narrow victories, with Leaders suffering some heavy disadvantages from the norm.

 

Aya had been new and didn't want the job anyway. Shade had made it a far more serious confrontation, letting me escape the more rigid constraints of a Gym battle. Shelly had been hurting after Corey's death, and was feeling responsible for Heather forcefully committed to Connal's Orphanage. How could he even work alongside with Team Meteor? I wondered, what part of his educated mind could argue that it was a sound idea?

 

But I knew I had little standing to criticize what he did. After all, I hadn't been raising orphans from a city-slum hybrid for who knew how many years. Instead, I was the one who had managed to get everyone else mad at me for reasons that had sounded pretty good at the time. Reasons like "shocking orphan children for no reason is wrong, inaction in disaster is wrong and will earn me enmity from the powers-that-be, hide if you don't want to die, clean up after your own messes" that sounded solid, but had produced terrible outcomes.

 

But about battles, it was simpler. Bennett knew the arena like his pocket, and had a team specifically adapted for it. My team, as Cal and then Cain had demonstrated, had been woefully inadequate. I needed to diversify my roster, take on some new Pokemon, and, as Charlotte had pointed out in her own way, just raise the level of my game. Really know what I was doing, instead of cluelessly ordering my Pokemon to use certain moves in hopes of hitting an enemy that had plans, strategies.

 

Some parts of this program could be done. Working with my Pokemon, help them grow and develop their strengths, was very possible. Finding and training some new ones to supplement gaps in what my current mons couldn't handle should be possible as well. But the part about actually getting good... that one wouldn't work without lots of thinking and lots of practise.

 

And I wasn't even sure I wanted to do it. I wouldn't have missed being a Trainer and all that came with it if I had never come to Reborn. Although that was wishful thinking, and it wasn't a good idea to get involved too much in it.

 

So I started training on the next day. With the six Pokemon that I believed gave me the best chances of beating Serra, Blaziken, Klang, Vanillish, Roselia, Meowstic and Ampharos, I went through the forest, I climbed in the mountains, and I caught a male Krokorok that enjoyed showing-off, and an adorable female Cutiefly.

 

 

 

I got Leaf the Blaziken to work on her punches and her kicks, her fire and her rhythm, on how to skip out of range after giving a blow. Watt the Ampharos, as a long-range, rather slow attacker, had to try and be faster, be more precise, resist attacks more, and of course keep hitting stronger.

 

Tech the Meowstic had to learn to be nimble on the ground, keep improving the screens he made, and make his psychic attacks stronger, more refined. Since he was so fast, and, well, psychic, he could try to sense incoming attacks and dodge them. It wouldn't be sure, but it would help, at times.

 

While they had very different styles, Sicy the Vanillish and Antum the Klang had to do the same thing to really start to shine: evolve. It was somewhat true for Wizzard the Roselia too, but he needed more practise before evolving. It helped a lot that, since we made no effort at concealment, wild Pokemon weren't shy of confronting us.

 

 

 

Training with so many Pokemon should have been overwhelming, but there was a simple solution: I could let them work together. To improve Tech's focus and Wizzard's strength, he could try and maintain a Light Screen for as long as possible while Wizzard tried to drain him. Leaf could spar against the evolved Klinklang, without putting any power in the kicks, dance around the deceptively fast Gear Pokemon, close in and strike while avoiding the counterblows.

 

I also paired Wizzard with Sicy, for the former to get stronger, and the latter to practice their Mirror Coat -- also Tech and Watt, for the former to hold up his Light Screens against a stronger attacker, and the latter to learn and strike faster, more precisely.

 

But all along the training sessions, as I walked, as I ate, the same worry was weighing upon me: there was a mysterious "curse" of undefined sort on these surroundings that caused random teleportations. I was dreading the moment where something would go missing and I would have to look for it in an unspecified range. Or I could end up teleported away from everything else, lost once again in the forest. Or I, or one of my Pokemon, could get splinched.

 

None of this happened.

I should have been glad.

All it did was make me more nervous.

 

Player's note:

Spoiler

There's apparently a big angry Steelix in the mountains. Let's see what we can do about it.

 

 

Let's start with the basics.

 

 

Steelix damage is Fake Out. I have no idea what the point of doing so little damage was.

 

 

And we Intimidate.

 

 

Callan evolved (because Earthquake is too tempting to resist) and sent one Foul Play and one Earthquake. None is very convincing damage, and so far he has taken two Iron Heads (through Reflect and Intimidate). Level 75 is nothing to sneeze at.

 

 

I switch to another Pokemon you may already know about. I really needed that Water-type, you know?

 

 

My screenshots are fuzzy on what exactly happened. I would guess that Morphism did some (water, maybe) damage but that the Steelix did more with Crunch.

 

 

And I need to put Reflect again.

 

 

Great.

 

 

I sent in Callan for another Intimidate and a truly incredible Earthquake (yes, it did some damage, just not very much -- yes, anything else might have been more useful. I'm not quite sure about what this field precisely does).

 

 

But Callan's efforts are doomed.

 

 

That was one of Leaf's Double Kicks. I'm not quite sure why Blaze Kick wasn't better though, even without Blaze activated.

 

 

But it isn't sufficient.

 

 

Fortunately, it takes a single blow from yet another new Pokemon... but is Hulu really a new Pokemon, rather than a very old one?

 

***

 

 

Next, we have a PULSE Abra to put down.

 

 

Classic, yet counter-productive, since the strategy is to take advantage of the Abra's stellar Special Attack and weak Defense to strike hard after a safe switch given by a Hyper Beam kill. Sometimes I wonder how I can be this dull.

 

 

Perfect.

 

 

Now we can strike.

 

 

Sorry, Morphism, but I trust Callan more than you to finish this.

 

 

Hyper Beam is a death ray. Thank the heavens for its drawback.

 

 

Oops, broke the machines... again.

 

 

Although, come to think of it, it's not really my problem, is it? 

 

 

Author's note:

Spoiler

You may have noticed that the game team has changed somewhat in the past chapters. I'm using Krookodile, Noivern, Gastrodon and Ribombee now. Let's say that Game!Gabriel is a bit in advance on Story!Gabriel, because training isn't quite as straightforward in-story and because I needed some new mons to do new things: Krookodile and Earthquake+Crunch+Intimidate/Moxie is extremely tempting to use against many a foe (Sirius or Sigmund, Abra, probably Radomus), Gastrodon offers Water coverage and not too shabby defenses, Ribombee has some great stabs and the incredible Quiver Dance, and so on.  

 

Also, we now have an estimate for the release of E19 and the explanation of many a sense-defying mystery: next spring. That might make 3-4 months, if the devs opted for a maximally pessimistic estimate, but more likely about 6 months. I wonder how much progress I'll have made in the meantime, and how much of canon I'll have to tweak to make it work. We'll see next spring, I guess. 

 

But I don't intend to stop and wait for the last episode. I can only hope I won't break anything that can't be repaired. 

 

Also, 60 chapters. I might have now published over 50% of the complete story. But I'm not quite sure, because what happens starting from the Circus, which I'm not entirely sure about, could well be longer than I expect. 

 

[Evi Crystal]

3 hours ago, Mindlack said:

But she had spent years in an Orphanage where neither the adults nor the children were particularly kind to her, even less to her younger and weaker sisters. So she had had to step up to the role of their defender.

 

It had happened far more easily than she could have expected. One day she was taking abuse... and seconds later she was berserk with unleashed anger, going for the terrified ex-bully's throat, so driven that she had had to be sedated. And even then, as the bully had sneered at her as she was enduring mandatory medicated rest, she had snapped. That boy's leg would always be fragile afterwards.

 

No one had tried to bully Saphira or her sisters after that. And that same rage, then fuelled by her failed attempt at claiming guardianship for her sisters, tore through the Reborn criminal ecosystem and secured a position at the top for the gang that employed her -- until she decided to wipe them out too

My heart... I think it's breaking because how I can feel and imagine of the sisters. I know it's not justified, but you can feel Saphira's pain and hate towards the world and the doctor. Gosh dammit

 

3 hours ago, Mindlack said:

After over an hour in the air, of sheer delight for Heather, and controlled unease for everyone else (Ciel liked flying as much as any good Flying-type Gym Leader, but not really in these conditions), they began landing on Calcenon.

 

It started as a little heartache to Heather when she looked at Calcenon. Everything was so small, seen from the air, so narrow, so locked-up. She envisioned herself living there, with other people, older than she was. She remembered Saphira and how Laura, Charlotte and everyone else obeyed her to the letter. She would just be trading a jail for another. That was all she had now.

 

Everyone but her was headed towards the ground. And she didn't have much choice than follow them. She had missed flying so much. She wasn't getting her Pokemon back, too. What a shame. But at least she could enjoy the Noivern just a little bit more, and have a last bit of fun by landing as fast as she dared.

 

But she had so little time. Everyone else was already close to the ground, slowing down as much as they could so that the landing would be utterly unnoticeable... She had just the time for one good nosedive.

Heather... Oh Heather

 

3 hours ago, Mindlack said:

And, the cold, humid wind of altitude burning her face and hurling at her ears, a feeling she relished, Heather realized that she had another choice. One that Gabriel would have dubbed the Wronski Feint, not of course that she knew it. So, instead of crashing on the ground, Heather flew up a couple of meters before the crash and laughed delightedly at the sensation of defying gravity, of, for the briefest instant, feeling pulled upwards by the acceleration needed to pull this fake-out landing off.

 

3 hours ago, Mindlack said:

Laura felt that her heart was about to stop. The idea that all these Pokemon would be forcefully given to the kind of scum that would buy them illegally sickened her. It saddened her for Charlotte, too. There was no way her sister, or Noel, or Anna could get them back, now.

 

"Don't look like that, there are certainly some better mons out there."

"These Pokemon," Laura answered disgustedly, "come either from their dead parents or their own effort as a child. But I understand there's little point complaining. Second shot: you took jewelry from the children. Where is it?"

"Seriously? You came all here for these trinkets that the boss took? But yeah, it was a new low for him."

Screw Sirius and screw you Sigmund too... My hate is over 9000 and I would like seeing them both getting her butts headed by Lin than just a Hyper Beam to the face

 

However I'm glad too see Gabriel improving and buding up his team. I wish we could see more sweet interactions between them

[Aphelli]

On 11/2/2021 at 3:14 PM, Evi Crystal said:

My heart... I think it's breaking because how I can feel and imagine of the sisters. I know it's not justified, but you can feel Saphira's pain and hate towards the world and the doctor. Gosh dammit

 

Heather... Oh Heather

 

 

Screw Sirius and screw you Sigmund too... My hate is over 9000 and I would like seeing them both getting her butts headed by Lin than just a Hyper Beam to the face

 

Evil smirk.

Just wait and see. 

 

On 11/2/2021 at 3:14 PM, Evi Crystal said:

However I'm glad too see Gabriel improving and buding up his team. I wish we could see more sweet interactions between them

 

I'll try to keep having these scenes, even though they tend to require some serious thinking about the mechanics of battling (where the more precise the picture, the harder it is to maintain a semblance of consistency). Let's say that Gabriel is not done building up his team. 

 

 

And now it's time for Chapter 61! I sort of hoped we could make it to the 20k views before that, but I suppose the new chapter is overdue. 

 

I suppose I should give advance warning: this chapter might contain dubious taste and possible plot holes, but I need to take chances at some point if I want to keep the story interesting and running before E19's release. 

 

 

Anyway, I hope you enjoy. 

 

 

Chapter 61: Overruling Dragons

 

 

Spoiler

Saphira didn't waste any time as she shot back into the base. Now that the power was dimmed, only a few sparse unbroken lamps were still glowing weakly. So despite how shoddy the entire structure was, they had planned in case something could go wrong with the power. That was interesting.

 

Or it could have been, if she wasn't as focused on her goal. She had let that Abra make a fool of her. That had been overconfidence on her part, of the very worst kind. Never assume that your enemies are defenceless. But now, the Team Meteor grunts knew very well who she was. And they made sure to stay out of her unstable, noisy, and completely terrifying way.

 

Laura had dealt with all the important objectives, or soon would. Saphira's goal was now to enact revenge upon the very highest layers of Meteor leadership, to assert once and for all what the dominance hierarchy was.

 

If you mess with me, I'll fuck you over a hundred times as hard.

 

She went straight for the PULSE room, where the thing that had once been an Abra might or might not be de-powered, but was certainly not able to teleport her away any longer. Certainly not with an Abra's Psychic powers enhanced by the mere emergency power of the station.

 

Her Dragonite's first attack partially uprooted the Abra through its psychic protection, and it followed through with a kick in the so-called Sirius's belly. The sadistic admin who had stolen from Anna and Heather and had her sister tortured, and who now wasn’t in control of anything worth naming any more flew into the opposite wall, and fell, thoroughly dazed.

 

"And now, onto us, Doctor." Saphira snarled.

 

 

"Saphira..." he started, in a voice he barely could manage to steady.

"I knew you were a liar. I knew you were a creep. But stooping this low..." she cut herself off in disgust.

"I would not abandon these children to the cruelty of—"

 

"Shut up." Saphira's voice carried an additional edge, beyond its usual armor of assertiveness and strength. "You enabled them. You let them do whatever they could." She almost spat the words. "Was it really Charlotte, or Laura, or I, who needed curing, when you had this vermin infesting our lands and you knew it?"

"But they would have found you out for the fraud that you are, and beaten you to death for your arrogance. How easy it was instead to reassure yourself by dealing with children who could not fight back."

"How cowardly of you. How repugnant."

 

Sigmund Connal wanted to open his mouth, but realized that it was beyond his control. His entire body was shaking. This Saphira... she was worse than what he expected. She was stuck in her own grievances that fed upon themselves, and all it would take to finally get her to go supernova was a single spark.

 

"And how are you any different?"

 

The voice belonged to a newcomer who had casually strolled into the room. It was more a mutter than a voice, and yet everyone heard it neatly. Said newcomer had the ageless face of a deathly pale woman, with long, tied, poisonous green hair and eyes of precisely the same shade.

 

This voice could have been human, but, in some respect that was difficult to define, it didn't feel this way. It was too sure of itself, too real, too quiet, yet so monotonous. And there was a clearly inhuman edge, a little hidden swell of cruelty, a treacherous fifth column of self-destruction in their tone. It was a mesmerizing sound that killed the very essence of hope, a rhythm that stopped hearts.

 

Saphira fought to suppress a shudder, and her Dragonite launched itself, on its own, at the horror in its sight. But the green-haired womanoid was too fast, and in the blink of an eye, there was a Hydreigon standing between them and the Leader's Dragonite.

 

"Dark Pulse."

 

The wave of darkness emanating from the three-headed, obviously feral dragon could have been Ungoliant's or Morgoth's. It was a parasitic emptiness that grew to devour light and heat, that turned life into a longing for suicide. The deadest of the antilight fell upon the Abra and killed it on the spot, but what fell on Saphira's Dragonite was sufficient to faint it instantly, while Saphira herself was reduced to a powerless bystander.

 

This is when the idea occurred to Saphira that she might be outclassed here.

 

"Ms. Lin, I pre—" Connal found it a smart idea to introduce himself.

 

The reply was as impersonal an instrument of destruction as a guillotine blade.

 

"Silence."

"Saphira Belrose." Lin muttered, their attention fully on the red-haired eldest of the orphaned Belrose sisters.

 

The words shouldn't have been audible, let alone so unsettling, but here they were. Saphira couldn't suppress another shudder, the terror was too strong -- it felt as if the devil itself was speaking her name as a special guest to the most damned of all realms of hell.

 

But the fear soon turned to anger. But, unusually, that anger of hers wasn't strong enough to push her into action. It was just a physiological reaction, her limbs felt so heavy. So unbelievably heavy!

 

"How interesting of you to be there. And how petty. You come here for Charlotte, do you not? Because she was hit, correct? But such is the way of the world. The strong prosper, and the weak suffer."

 

"Spirit cannot help you, Saphira. Let alone pitiful family bonds. In the end, as you have known for so long, nothing beats power. And you don't have it. You were weak once ago, remember? You were a victim then. But this never changes. You have never ceased being one."

 

 

At the cost of an superhuman effort, Saphira managed to grab a Pokeball. An enraged Naganadel flung itself out, shooting a wrathful Draco Meteor at the Hydreigon, at its impossible enemy.

 

But once again, Lin was even faster. Somehow a lean, malicious-looking Goodra was in the path of the shots, and it immediately fainted to the attack – but Saphira's jolt of last-ditch strength was spent.

 

"You figured out the ways of this world well enough. Hence the reason why you went through the motions. You trusted your desperately-earned strength, your reputation, to protect you from every hurt. But this, too, was denial. In the end, you are still powerless. You and yours, you are made to be hurt. Flies to be swatted. Toys to be broken and discarded."

 

 

 

*

 

For how long could they have even worked in this thing? Laura thought while escaping the now even more chaotic power room. It had been huge, utterly chaotic and so smoke-filled that living there should have deserved an award of some sort. She hoped that what she had finally done -- neatly uncoupling the turbine from the alternator, and only then damaging the latter -- wouldn't have impacts too terrible.

 

So the lighting of the base had dropped to a bare minimum, with obviously some sort of emergency backup functioning. Laura didn't feel like she had reason to go destroy that one too -- it would probably have done more bad than good. It could have seriously damaged the ventilation system, for instance.

 

And now, she was back in the corridors, searching for a mysterious safe in a hypothetical room "somewhere around there" while Saphira was rampaging back in the base, and probably giving the Doctor the smackdown of his life.

 

Or his death.

 

Laura was surprised that after all the evil Connal had committed, or made himself an accomplice of, she still was more than disturbed at the idea. Perhaps he had meant well at some point. Perhaps he had even helped them in his own way. But she shoved these concerns aside for the moment.

 

After an increasingly agitated search, Laura finally found a small electronic safe in a room more central in the layout of the Meteor hideout. But obviously, with the power cut, the safe couldn't be opened by her Rotom (Wash, of course: she had a strong affinity with Grass-type Pokemon – that didn’t mean she was blind). There seemed to be a keyhole to operate the safe manually, but she couldn't do that either.

 

Instead, Laura thought of one of Saphira's birthday presents: a very rare, and dreadfully powerful Grass-type.

 

"Kartana, would you mind, please?"

 

In five seconds, it was over: the door to the safe had been neatly fractured, and Laura was free to peak at its valuable contents. There was cash in there, some gold, and many pieces of jewelry.

 

Laura thought that all the kids she had sheltered deserved some serious compensation for Team Meteor's treatment of them, not to mention to repair their lives of misery, but she just took Anna's pendant. Only one item could be the Ruby Ring, and, after finding an inscription of "to my dearest Elena" signed Corey Molinar on the gold plating, there was little enough reason not to take it.

 

"Nite?" she asked on the radio.

 

"You bitch thief!" a winged Meteor female member snarled at her.

 

Laura turned towards her new foe, irate. She was not a thief. They were the thieves. They had done unspeakable evil.

 

“Listen, you—”

 

She cut herself off when she realized that the Kartana had acted without instructions, and flung itself at the Meteor grunt who had blanched. And suddenly the top part of her uniform was cut and couldn't hold on its own, and her indignation turned to mortification, while Laura herself wasn't feeling very at ease at her Pokemon's way of cutting the tension.

 

But Saphira hadn't responded, which could not be a good thing. She had to check on this PULSE. She recalled the Kartana, trusting her long-standing allies Breloom and Lilligant to handle confrontations more decently.

 

It took her a few more minutes to find the PULSE room, but, in retrospect, it should have been easy: somehow, it was always, at each crossroads, in the direction that she dreaded most.

 

Even for the scant and weak emergency lighting, the room was dark. She could barely make out Saphira – but how contorted her face seemed! She looked devored by her anger, who had fed on her instead of pushing her into action. And despite the intensity of the feeling, it made her look far, far weaker than she was, far weaker than she could be, utterly powerless as she shouldn't be. And there was a terrifying green-haired figure in front of her, speaking in the voice of death itself, controlling and lethal and yet comfortable, the voice the Grim Reaper itself would use to convince you to come along with it.

 

"But this, too, was denial. In the end, you are still powerless. You, and yours, are made to be hurt. Flies to be swatted. Toys to be broken and discarded. How could it be any different?"

 

A shape of blackness that somehow looked hungry was seemingly floating in the direction of the top Gym Leader of Reborn.

 

Laura felt her heart pound faster, her fists clench, her blood boil, her head burn. That was not right. Whatever this thing was... there was no way she was letting them touch Saphira.

 

"But fear not." Lin went on, intent on their prey. "This one loss that you have dreaded for so long will be your very last one."

 

 

Seeing Saphira's distressed, mutely pleading face, did it. The little surplus of wrath drove Laura into action. Like hell she would.

 

"Try it, bitch." she spat defiantly, not even knowing what she was uttering.

 

Lin turned around, slowly facing Laura with a smidge of curiosity in their eyes, like a psychopath who ripped wings from flies would watch another fly trying to fall in their merciless hands. And Laura started feeling how ridiculous it was, how out of her league she was if Saphira had been beaten.

 

Then the Breloom's Focus Punch hit Lin in the face with a furious force that could have ripped a man's head. But Lin didn't lose their own. They simply collapsed motionless, fainted.

 

The spell of dread was lifted. Saphira looked down at the creature that had nearly got her, winced a little in disgust, and walked a few wobbly steps. Even Sirius started groggily shaking his head.

 

"I got our second target." Laura told her. "We should go."

"Yeah..." Saphira trailed off dazedly. "Yes." she repeated, resolute and firm again. "We're done here."

 

 

*

 

 

 

So, Serra thought, life could go on as usual. Things would tend to get away from her. First it had been her beloved career, that she had given up for the sake of her son. Then it had felt like the entire world, when she had decided that city life wasn't helping her raise Bennett and moved away into the calmer Reborn Region.

 

As time passed, her looks had started failing her, too: little wrinkles that she couldn't manage to not track, a certain sparkle in her eyes that faded from day to day, and her overall body declining in strength and in beauty, in a slow but utterly predictable fashion. It may have been natural, what happened to everyone, but it didn't feel this way. Oh, how she would have wished for it to be different!

 

More lately, as he was growing up, Bennett was being ever more remote, absorbed in his own preoccupations that he did not really care to share or explain, and she felt alienated from him too. Even so, the sudden and surprising arrival of Luna and her occasional partner-in-definitely-not-crime the Gossip Gardevoir, maybe six months ago, had upset the household's dreary balance in a very positive way – yet Luna was gone without so much as a word, and she hadn't heard from her in weeks. Her absence had done something to Bennett too – her boy's crush on her was as obvious as his reluctance to even acknowledge it.

 

The day before, Bennett had left with this El, with only a hastily written note of explanation, a claim that El was able to train him to get into the Elite Four. If it were true, that would have been wonderful news – his son finding his calling, a career, colleagues to help him evolve in a world he knew so little about. But she was worried it could be a lure – if not a lie, for not even priests were above them – that it would ensnare her son in webs he found out about too late.

 

And now, a locomotive had broken into her house and nearly flattened her – no one really ever bothered to piece it out in these troubled days, but that was one of the massive power surges of the PULSE Abra following Laura's actions. Even her very life was in the process of leaving her. She could hear the bystanders worried about what to do, and she didn't care. Let it be all over...

 

But for some reason, this Gabriel had still called her while she was in the wreckage of her own house, and the phone still somehow worked. As if nothing had happened, he had asked for a battle in the following morning. There was something in the sheer obliviousness of such an inappropriately-timed request that made her almost curious.

 

Serra got another phone call in the evening. A more unexpected one, too.

 

 

*

 

After their successful raid, the two elder Belrose sisters had retreated back to the house to take a little rest, and allow Cain to go on his quest to not let Heather alone. Ciel had located her in the colder Ametrine, higher up in the mountains, but the red-haired girl had found a shelter and had refused to engage the circus starlet, a stand that her new-found and unofficial guardian had sternly supported. Ciel didn't insist, all the more so since her Noivern had come back on its own.

 

"So what are we going to do now?" Laura sleepily asked Saphira, her adrenalin crashing, after a light early dinner.

"Can't you stop it with the eights?" Saphira replied. "You don't need it." He paused, then smiled at her sister, a warm smile of trust, of thankfulness. "If anything, you are the control on the world."

"I don't know why I acted this way." the younger girl shuddered. "I realize only now how stupid it was!"

"Listen, Laura, it doesn't matter." Saphira replied. "It worked out well in the end. Now, we don't have anything they're looking after, and they'll be licking their wounds after all this. We won't have to face them again."

"But something is not quite right, is it?" Laura objected. "How could Lin get the advantage on you? And then how could I one-up her?"

 

A grim, pained expression went on Saphira's voice.

 

"I don't know. There was something in her... Something compelling and deadly in her voice, in her eyes, everything. Like... a snake that hypnotized you to better destroy you..."

"I had something very different in my mind..." Laura wondered hesitatingly. "That's what Noel told you, right? The eyepatch man came for the jewels, specifically. But not at the start of their captivity. And he was very interested in Anna's Pendant."

"What do you mean?" Saphira frowned.

"My question is pretty simple: why the jewels?"

 

"I don't know." Saphira admitted. "Who doesn't like jewels? Even this Solaris guy was apparently interested in a gem of Amaria's, some Saphire Bracelets..."

 

Saphire for love, her brain supplied on automatic.

 

But where did she remember it from?

 

The police's transcript of Gabriel's interviews, she realized. What were the others?

Ruby for pain. Amethyst for beyond. Emerald for faith.

Hm...

 But that was madness, right? Absurdly twisted and complicated, right?

 

If so, Saphira pondered, if so, then...

 

"Saphira, are you really feeling quite all right?" Laura asked anxiously.

"I'm not sure..." Saphira trailed off. "I'm not sure at all. But I think there's a pattern here. What if Team Meteor as a whole was really interested in these things? Anna's Amethyst Pendant? Heather's Ruby Ring? Amaria's Bracelets sure turned their boss's head..."

"Saphire Bracelets, like Dad's anniversary present to Mom?" Laura said briskly, the outlandish possibility jumping to her mind.

"Wha— That's just impossible." Saphira pointed out, although her eyes widened as she realized what Laura had in mind. "How would Amaria have acquired them? I haven't seen them, so they even could have nothing in common."

 

But Laura wasn't even listening to Saphira any more. Her mind was racing in another track, discarding the possible.

 

Where had Heather got her Ruby Ring? It was her mother's, wasn't it? Elena Molinar…

 

“But where did these gems come from anyway?” Laura mumbled. “Why did they end up in League hands?”

 

 

*

 

"Why did you want to go back with them, Eve? We could have been free at last and lived in peace forever."

"Because we made a deal, Lumi. Besides, that would be just like kidnapping Zero, wouldn't it?"

"I'm right here, you know?" Zero grumbled.

"But Zero," Lumi pleaded on, "how interested in them are you anyway?"

"I don't know. But what I know is that Lin's interested in me, and I'm not making her mad. Neither should you, either."

 

 

*

 

 

"Sirius, I am disappointed in you." Lin muttered.

 

The Team Meteor Executive was standing in the middle of his troops in the wrecked, smoke-filled power room of the ruined Meteor basis, with Lin watching him from the border of the circle. They would leave soon, but there was a reckoning to be made. A payback as public and painful as the humiliation they had experienced. The silence was so absolute that everyone heard Lin's voice.

 

"You were not able to use the PULSE Abra to our satisfaction," Lin went on, "and, instead, you let it toy with us and our purpose. You were not able to notice and subdue the threats that infiltrated our compound, and did not care to find out why this faithful lapdog of yours – they spared a small glance for the beat-up, broken, crying Ricardo in front of them – was so afraid of them. Perhaps he would have had some wisdom to share. Most damning, you were not able to retain the keys, and you failed to discipline the grunts who let their location away."

 

Their voice was carrying some sort of soothing familiarity, not unlike a nurse's tone talking a patient to sleep. However, it lacked any form of emotion, and that made it sound as if their words were the tunnel leading the listener to a merciless, bloodthirsty Grim Reaper.

 

Sirius was dying to answer, but everything in Lin's face – or, equivalently, nothing – indicated him that he was not to talk, only to comply; not to protest, only to atone.

 

"This once, I will offer you mercy, Sirius." they almost spat the last word, and yet it sounded very similar to all the previous ones. "I shall call it an investment in your personal growth. See to it that it pays off."

 

Relief shot up Sirius's face. She was retaining him. She wasn't going to...

 

Lin's finger twitched.

 

A terrified man wearing gloves and holding a piece of glowing coal came into the circle.

 

"But you cannot be let off the hook without any consequences." Lin added in this very quiet whisper that everyone else was terrified to hear.

 

"Remove your eyepatch, Sirius."

 

His hand trembling, the black-haired man complied, revealing the ugly scar in his left eye, revealing that someone had poked it out. His leg started to quiver, and he fought to keep control of his bowels and bladder. Because there was no telling about what Lin would do to him in this case.

 

"Kneel."

 

Sirius fell on his knees like a man sentenced to death.

 

Everyone remembered his nightmarish scream as the glowing hot piece of coal seared the flesh surrounding his pierced eye.

 

 

 

*

 

 

"I'm tired, Simon." Tara muttered.

 

She had been feverish for a while, and maybe even delirious. But he had no choice but press on, carrying her on his shoulders. Tara was heavy, it was dark in the mountain, and the ground was tricky and unequal, but he had to get as much distance between Team Meteor and himself as he could.

 

The little note he had received wasn't very explicit, but it didn't need to. The three letters of Lin were as terrifying a threat as anyone could make.

 

How was he supposed to know that these shining trinkets were actually important?

 

 

 

*

 

 

I had half-hoped for, half-dreaded my second encounter with Bennett, but Serra told me on the Wednesday morning that he had decided to leave on his own, as this El had offered to train him to join the Elite Four. Such a story surprised me, as I didn't expect that the Elite Four of the Reborn League was looking for applicants – or even interested in them.

 

It hurt to admit it even to myself, but I felt a little stung that El had decided to train this boy instead of me. He had certainly had a pretty good reason for it, since Bennett had quite effortlessly beaten me on this arena, in front of him. Yet I remembered El's claims about his delicate standing with the League, and something didn't seem right about this story. Then again, everything was strange around Reborn City, wasn't it?

 

"I hope that he'll succeed. He was certainly very impressive." I answered Serra. Then I took a more serious tone. "I apologize for my call of yesterday. I hadn't realized what had happened to you. If you want, I can wait."

 

"No." Serra replied with a little smile that didn't really look heartfelt. "I'll battle you right now, if you want."

 

And so we started. And the training paid off, definitely.

 

I had evolved Wizzard into a Roserade, and Nature Power turned into the deadly Mirror Shot on this field. Both Sicy the Vanilluxe and Antum the Klinklang knew this technique as well. Rounding up the group, I had chosen Leaf, Watt and Tech to add some variety to the team.

 

 

And thanks to Wizzard, we did magic. Not Rincewind magic, but actual wonders. Powerful and deadly, the Mirror Shots sowed disarray in Serra's team, whether executed by Sicy or Antum or Wizzard. It was sad, in a sense. Bright light and a little bit of steel made strategy and defence almost unnecessary – Serra had almost no counter there, Leaf could beat her Alolan Sandslash, the only one who could resist the onslaught of Mirror Shots, and Sicy's Mirror Coats managed to rob her of the initiative, turning what attacks I could not pre-empt against her.

 

Serra's formal battle speech wasn't entirely prophetic. It was not over before I knew it, but I won quickly. And as a reward, I had obtained a new Badge that looked vaguely like a Pac-Man with strange colors, the Rime Badge, and the Aurora Veil.

 

"I know what you're thinking," Serra said softly, watching me stare at her face. "You're thinking that I let you win."

 

Yes, I was certainly wondering that. At least, that was the best part of my thoughts that she could guess. But I kept on watching her, trying not to give away either answer, in case she took offence with the one I suggested.

 

"I've seen a lot of challengers," Serra confirmed, "and I hardly see original strategies these days. I've even seen a Roserade wreak havoc with my mirrors a couple of days ago. While you had the initiative and power, I might have been able to outmaneuver you. But that's not my role."

 

"No, I believe that it would be mine." As if on cue, a soft voice came from the stands beyond the one-way mirrors that I had believed empty, "That just was a very interesting battle, Gabriel. Allow me to congratulate you on your victory."

 

Laura walked down the stairs and towards me, her expression rather earnest with perhaps the hint of a tentative smile. I remembered her strangely solemn turns of sentence. Then, it had felt vaguely positive, but now, I found them ominous. I remembered that she had agreed to my out-of-the-blue eviction from her home, on the sole reason that I could be dangerous to them. It certainly wasn't an unfounded reason, given my immediate record, but that meant that I would likely not find the interaction pleasant.

 

But it didn't mean I couldn't try my best at letting it start in the best way possible. So I tried to grow back a little smile on my face, and ask in a politely pleasant voice:

 

"Thank you, Laura, and good morning. How are you?"

  

 

 

Player's note (1):

Spoiler

 

Serra is one of Reborn's most infamous Leaders, and I was not looking forward to facing her. Then again, no Leader from now on is going to be a breeze, so I don't think I'm really looking forward to facing anyone else. Maybe Terra because I think I found ways to make her less annoying. Or maybe not because I still have no idea how I'll portray her. But let's get to the point.

 

I played this fight without using the features of Switch Mode, but with items.

 

 

Fortunately, there is a secret weapon against Serra.

Wiki+smogon calculator.

 

Um, I meant Mirror Shot. That's why my team is made of

Blaziken, Klinklang, Vanilluxe, Ribombee, Ampharos and Meowstic.

 

The reasoning is as follows:

Klinklang and Vanilluxe can use Mirror Shot (has doubled power, is almost always super effective and x4 on two mons, and never misses).

Ribombee is fast, can set up, and knows Dazzling Gleam (never misses and x1.5 on the field).

Meowstic sets up priority screens.

Ampharos is reasonably strong and bulky (although it was a mistake to not EV train it at all, unlike the aforementioned Pokemon).

And Blaziken is self-explanatory, really.

 

 

Looking back on it, I definitely didn't play this fight as well as possible. I sacked mons where it might not have been necessary, I made wrong move choices, I forgot some mons' movesets and didn't make the right damage calcs. I made one incorrect damage calc (which actually didn't matter) and failed to correctly interpret another. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

 

 

Klinklang is rather fast and has 120 EV in SpAtk, and I made sure that this is enough for field-boosted Mirror Shot with a Steel Gem to outspeed and one-shot Glaceon.

 

 

So Serra is instantly down a mon and she wasn't able to set up Aurora Veil either. Great start.

 

 

Um. Alolan Sandshrew is really fast under the hail and knows Brick Break. So let's set up screens, right?

 

 

In the switch, Tech took a Brick Break first and then an Iron Head.

 

 

And then we move to a Pokemon far better suited to handle A-Sandshrew.

 

 

But Serra isn't as stupid as the 3G AI (I will not confirm or deny that I watched too much Emerald Kaizo where the AI is rather switch-averse). I'm not sure whether Double Kick was better than Blaze Kick (especially since Leaf held a Charcoal). I was worried about missing, but it's very possible that Blaze Kick would have killed the Jynx.

 

Anyway, Psyshock is incoming, hence the switch back to Klinklang. And now, Klinklang is going back to kick ass, because there is nothing Jynx can do to it, right?

 

 

Oh.

 

 

That was a close call. But Antum got the last Mirror Shot in.

 

 

But it's now too weak to take a Brick Break in most cases, and doesn't OHKO by far. So I switch back to Leaf, which might have been a bad play, since Leaf loses a good chunk of health and the screens are no more.

 

 

Worse, Leaf forces Serra to switch to Froslass, and like an idiot I clicked Double Kick once more... so that Leaf doesn't even do damage and hurts herself instead.

 

Now, the situation is quite bad. Klinklang, Leaf and Meowstic are too weak to take an attack from A-Sandslash, and I think that pretty much no one else has a serious chance of beating it. But Klinklang is a very important mon in this fight (for its resistances and Mirror Shot), while Leaf is basically a time bomb.

 

 

So I essentially sack Leaf to heal Antum the Klinklang.

 

 

And I let Sicy take care of Froslass with Mirror Shots.

 

 

Well, this is still not good. Aurora Veil reinforces Serra's defences an awful lot.

 

 

But Sicy does a good job, and it's a high roll. The 2HKO is quite unlikely (blame Sicy's Careful nature) at this point, but it's definitely doable.

 

 

Froslass used Ice Beam and Sicy used another Mirror Shot. I didn't check the math, but I think it was more effective than Mirror Coat (which, correct me if I'm wrong, could have missed).

 

 

Serra (predictably) healed her ace but that's too bad for her. That crit may have mattered a lot. It's 1.30 am, I'm tired and I'm not quite sure any more.

 

 

Serra sent out her A-Ninetales, so now there's hail (and Slush Rush, great). And Dazzling Gleam is going to hurt. But I don't want to damage, however slightly, Klinklang in a switch when Vanilluxe can do the same thing (slightly less fast, maybe) and I'm not in a rush.

 

 

Well, perhaps I should have switched to Klinklang.

 

 

To paraphrase [spoilers], "ugh, it lived through that??"

 

 

You can rest now, Sicy. You've done well.

 

 

So I actually measured pixels to make sure that Ribombee could finish the Ninetales off with Dazzling Gleam at SpAtk +1. The worst-case scenario was pretty close.

(by the way, did anyone point out how weird it is that some Alolan forms be Ice-types when Alola is a tropical archipelago?)

 

 

And I did the calculation wrong because I forgot that A-Ninetales was Calm (so +SpDef). But the attack turned out to be a crit, so it worked out.

 

 

 

And the enemy is still there. At that point, I forgot that Jynx was taken care of, and I start to panic, because there is no way for Elidee to do meaningful damage to Sandslash, and not much way for anyone else still alive (Meowstic, Klinklang, Ampharos) to help against Jynx. Only Ampharos really has a chance... this is why I sack Ribombee after she does her damage.

 

I probably should have done a second Quiver Dance on Ninetales to lower the Sandslash's HPs more.

 

 

Rest well. You did good.

 

 

Watt used Discharge (helped by Quick Claw), while Sandslash used Icicle Crash. Now, just one more hit...

 

 

That happened after the Sandslash's Icicle Crash. Oh well. Time for a Hyper Potion...

 

 

Again?? I have another Hyper Potion, but after that, it's going to be tricky...

 

 

Come on. Now I have a Lemonade, which lets me try again...

 

 

And the Quick Claw activates again. Yes!

 

 

So this is Serra's last mon! And it's x4 weak to Mirror Shot! The best way to go is thus just to sack Watt to let Antum outspeed and one-shot the Aurorus.

 

 

The last sacrifice...

 

 

The steel shines through...

 

 

Got it. Whew.

I wonder how different it would have been if I destroyed the field immediately (with a slightly changed team, of course)? Or if I played better?

 

Player's note (2):

Spoiler

Let’s find out in this second Serra fight!

I don't destroy the field either. But since I don't trust Leaf, I can as well replace her with a mon that should perform well.

Namely, Nature Power Roserade.

Basically, with its IVs (full 31 SpA and Spe, and +SpA/-SpD nature) and sufficient EVs, Roserade outspeeds and oneshots Serra's entire team but Sandslash-Alola and Froslass.

 

This fight isn't as clean as I would have wished (I probably played it too late to think the deviations through), but it's a lot easier than the previous one.

 

 

So it begins.

 

 

And Wizzard does some magic.

 

 

This is not Sandslash, nor Froslass.

 

 

So rinse and repeat Nature Power.

 

 

That explains Aurorus.

 

 

Hard switch to put in some screens, but Tech isn't going to kill the Sandslash.

 

 

Reflect is most important.

 

 

And I get lucky.

 

 

Light Screen is just in case, as I expect Sandslash to knock me out. Or, if it misses, it takes some damage, not enough to motivate the use of a Potion but enough for my counter-measure to Alolan Sandslash to kill it.

 

 

At this point I'm expecting the Sandslash to knock me out for real.

 

 

But I get a little too lucky here, and I didn't think things through.

 

 

Because I used Psychic too, and didn't expect Sandslash to become so low. I switch Tech out as the hail just ended. The issue, of course, is that Serra is going to heal Sandslash. It could have been better to use Psychic then, which did the little bit of damage that may have sufficed for the next mon to one-shot Sandslash. But that's nitpicking, no?

 

 

Sandslash is indeed healed.

 

 

How fortunate that I have screens.

 

 

Icicle Crash and Iron Head tend to flinch, so best to slow Sandslash down (the hail is no more so Watt is now faster).

 

 

Two Discharges and one full paralysis later, Sandslash is no more.

 

 

That one's trickier. I didn't think of my switch here. So I improvised and it's a little messy.

 

 

I switch to Elidee while Serra sets the Veil up. That's more or less inevitable but still not very good. Now all Elidee can do is a little damage.

 

 

 

Aurora Veil is busted. And the Ninetails used Nasty Plot...

 

 

Yes, Elidee was doomed, but let's be honest, she was never intended to be the mvp.

 

 

Did I mention that Roserade outspeeds and kills A-Ninetails with the field-boosted Mirror Shot even through the Aurora Veil?

 

 

Roserade is still valuable against Jynx, so I replace it with Sicy the Vanilluxe. I EV trained it in SpDef just enough to live one Ice Beam crit and one Shadow Ball crit (a pain since I didn't want to buy the power item). But the Ice Beam in the switch wasn't a crit so it was even more damped by Light Screen.

 

 

The Froslass's second Ice Beam (why not Shadow Ball? to punish the Roserade switch?) is a crit, but that leaves a lot of HP to go on, while Mirror Shot gets a good roll.

 

 

Froslass uses Ice Beam again where Shadow Ball crit could kill and gets the absolute smallest damage output with Ice Beam. And Vanilluxe lives to use Mirror Shot another time.

 

 

Sicy gets the 2HKO that wasn't certain (about 80% chance). And now it's over because I can stall out the Aurora Veil and then outspeed and one-shot with Wizzard's Mirror Shot.

 

 

But instead of going for Focus Blast, Jynx also goes for the mostly harmless Ice Beam, so Sicy can get another Mirror Shot in. And then the second Ice Beam (that would have killed Sicy) somehow misses, which leaves Sicy with an opportunity.

 

 

And that's the Ice Badge with one (probably avoidable) death and one unusued Pokemon, with no use of the features of switch mode (although I technically was in switch mode) and no healing items.

 

 

 

Death count:

Spoiler

Total Parts 1: 6

Total Part 2: 1

Kiki-Aya: 0

Aya-Serra: 1

(it occurred while grinding in the Grand Hall. These Trainers are dangerous to grind on, because they always have tricks up their sleeves...)

Current Part 3: 1

Current total: 8

 

[CrystalStar]

I loved how you wrote out all the scenes of Lin, her as a ruthless leader and especially Sirius' punishment

Also looking at the story from the different perspective of characters was unexpected but really nice 

[Evi Crystal]

Alright this chapter has satisfied my mood at the fullest positivity and was a nice touch with Lin's appearance- more in the creepy and scariest way bc you know her shivers.

 

Now I'm sounded like a sadist, but I smiled at Sirius punishment to be honest. Serve him right for what he did to the children in the Yureyu. Take that evil laughter

 

But I found it kinda interesting, that Laura had a Water-type Pokenon in her team. It fits the garden/nature aesthetic and it looks like she could specialise in Water types (mostly for the cover up weaknesses).

[Aphelli]

 

On 11/20/2021 at 4:41 PM, Evi Crystal said:

Alright this chapter has satisfied my mood at the fullest positivity and was a nice touch with Lin's appearance- more in the creepy and scariest way bc you know her shivers.

 

Now I'm sounded like a sadist, but I smiled at Sirius punishment to be honest. Serve him right for what he did to the children in the Yureyu. Take that evil laughter

 

On 11/20/2021 at 2:27 PM, CrystalStar said:

I loved how you wrote out all the scenes of Lin, her as a ruthless leader and especially Sirius' punishment

 

It was difficult to decide was Lin would be like because we have so little information on her overall. She's just an overworld sprite who's supposed to be unbeatable and speaks in an edgy way.

 

But she would appear very differently to an onlooker if she were an actual person, a robot, some sort of Arceus-powered astral projection, or whatever the devs actually have in mind. Plus there's something about her being ungodly powerful and effortlessly shutting down everyone else. So I decided that she had power, but I thought that, given Saphira's background, it would take more than that to make her yield. Hence the creepiness. I'm glad I did it alright. 

 

(although it feels wrong to put that sort of thing in the fic. It's not really the kind of fear I like as a story component.)

 

As for Sirius? I agree that he got his punishment coming for all his past misdeeds. I'll admit I expected a reaction a bit less enthusiastic, but this just means I'll have to be harsher next time...

Oh wait. 

 

On 11/20/2021 at 4:41 PM, Evi Crystal said:

But I found it kinda interesting, that Laura had a Water-type Pokenon in her team. It fits the garden/nature aesthetic and it looks like she could specialise in Water types (mostly for the cover up weaknesses).

 

I didn't really think of the aesthetic. I thought it would be fitting that she had a Rotom (because it's a cool mon, and it can be a grass type), and then I decided to make it a Rotom-Wash because the quip amused me.   

 

On 11/20/2021 at 2:27 PM, CrystalStar said:

Also looking at the story from the different perspective of characters was unexpected but really nice 

 

I wasn't sure what I would do for the Meteor raid. I was thinking of ditching it altogether, since Gabriel had no reason to carry it out. And then it occurred to me that the attack could still happen without him, and forth came the ideas for this small arc. While I didn't have to switch viewpoints so much, it simply felt right to give some of the secondary characters some screen time. After all, they're part of this story too. 

 

[Evi Crystal]

18 minutes ago, Mindlack said:

I didn't really think of the aesthetic. I thought it would be fitting that she had a Rotom (because it's a cool mon, and it can be a grass type), and then I decided to make it a Rotom-Wash because the quip amused me.   

Gotcha

Almost forgot about the change forms for a second, but that's a true fact. Maybe Rottom is doing some chores in the house bc how practical it is.

 

22 minutes ago, Mindlack said:

As for Sirius? I agree that he got his punishment coming for all his past misdeeds. I'll admit I expected a reaction a bit less enthusiastic, but this just means I'll have to be harsher next time...

Oh wait. 

Yikes, he's going to vent his anger to a certain  turncoat someone. I can feel it

[Aphelli]

On 11/21/2021 at 6:55 PM, Evi Crystal said:

Almost forgot about the change forms for a second, but that's a true fact. Maybe Rottom is doing some chores in the house bc how practical it is.

 

That's a good point, I can easily see the Rotom giving a little boost when the power is unreliable (which has to happen).  

 

On 11/21/2021 at 6:55 PM, Evi Crystal said:

Yikes, he's going to vent his anger to a certain  turncoat someone. I can feel it

 

I'm not sure who you're talking about actually. Maybe instead he'll book a session with Sigmund like a regular customer. It shouldn't be too awkward, Sigmund is a psychiatrist with some experience, he must have seen weirder at some point. 

 

 

So, I'm back with another chapter. These chapter breaks get longer and longer, and I have less and less to show for it. This one might be okay (maybe even not), but I'm concerned about the ones currently in the works: the drafts for 63-66 are complete but certainly need editing -- although I'm still afraid they're just not good -- 67 is in progress with similar concerns, and I'm dreading the chapters 68-70 for the Part 3 finale because I still can only make limited sense of what is going to happen. 

 

But let tomorrow worry about tomorrow. I hope you enjoy (and if not, let me know why, I guess)!

 

 

Chapter 62: The Interview

 

Spoiler

Laura didn't answer my question with pleasantries, which didn't bode very well.

 

“Serra, please,” she asked, “can you leave us a moment?”

 

I saw Serra raise her eyebrows a little bit.

 

“Laura, I gave you the information you asked for and let you attend the battle because you're in the Elite Four.” she said calmly. “I don't feel playing a mediator in an affair you did not tell me anything about.”

“Then I apologize for exploiting your hospitality.” Laura answered earnestly, her smile gone from her face, but she didn't relent. “But Gabriel and I still need to talk. Hopefully, it should be short enough and peaceful.”

 

Serra was unimpressed.

 

“Gabriel, is this okay with you?” she eyed me.

 

I glanced at Laura, who was now staring at me. She really looked intent on having this talk. After all, it couldn't go worse than my previous interaction with her family. Not in someone else's place, with their knowledge, at least.

 

Probably. After all, “worse” was a very tricky word.

 

“Okay, if it seems so important.” I answered the former model.

“Fine,” Serra shrugged – which mechanically brought my gaze a bit away from her face for a split second before my ego took back control – and left the room.

“So, what was so important?” I asked Laura, as she didn't want to start the conversation.

“I must apologize to you on several levels.” she stated earnestly.

 

How serious she was about this disturbed me a little. People in general didn't apologize to me. Why should they? What would be the point of resenting them? I couldn't change them. All I could do was making sure that I could take the injury, voluntary or not, in “good fun” or not. And make apologies myself when it was too much for me to contain. She looked at me for a few long seconds, as if she wanted to add something, then took a deep breath and went on.

 

“I welcomed you as guest in my home. Yet I was an accomplice to your eviction. I helped my sister act on mere suspicions.”

 

What could I answer to such a statement?

 

“It's all in the past now.” I replied lightly. “I can't say that it didn't hurt,” I added with a bit more intensity, remembering Saphira's accusations, “but perhaps it was better this way.” I concluded, resigned.

“But Saphira did not know anything about you.” Laura replied softly. “She questioned many people to learn the facts. And she made a decision on her own. That does not mean that she was right.”

“But she was. Here, I'm only someone who's really good at getting other people hurt. And math, to some extent, I guess.” I added the second sentence as an afterthought.

“Please let me judge that on my own.” Laura pleaded.

 

Now I was just confused.

 

“What do you want from me?” I asked awkwardly.

“I know the mere facts, and little more. I would like to ask you questions, please.”

 

It wasn't like I had anything better to do, even though I could not comprehend Laura's purpose. If she wanted some more truths, I could tell them. Whether she wanted to use them for me, or against me, or just because she wanted answers, wasn't really my concern.

 

“I'll try to answer the best I can.”

 

Laura motioned me to the stands, where we sat, leaving one empty seat between the two of us.

 

And then she started to question me. Laura asked me about most of my experience in and around Reborn City, even though she already knew most of the painful steps I had walked. She asked me about my encounters with Team Meteor's PULSEs, the Tangrowths of Obsidia, Jasper, Beryl, the Muk of Blacksteam Factory, the Camerupt on Pyrous Mountain. She asked me about the other times I had faced Team Meteor, in Azurine Island and during our assault on the half-buried Yureyu corporate headquarters, about my encounters with Corey.

 

She asked about the facts even though she seemed to know most of them – apart from my afternoon in Onyx Trainer School which she specifically asked about – but she was also interested in why I had acted in a specific way.

 

What I had thought throughout the time Heather had been at the Orphanage against her will, why I had decided to pretend I could negotiate with the Doctor and why I hadn't stormed the place with Cain and Shelly – the obvious thing all along. If the Doctor decided to listen to anyone, it would be someone speaking reason backed with some pretense of authority.

 

Why I had decided to fight Team Meteor at every corner – there was no alternative. Why I had acted as I had during the events that culminated in Kiki's death – an attempt at winning rather than simply fighting, undermined by my own thoughtlessness and cowardice. Why I had brought back books for Shelly – how else could I help her soothe her sorrow and grief? Why I had bought food, pullovers and sleeping bags for the children for after the Yureyu rescue – what else would have been as useful for the unknown contingencies afterwards?

 

It wasn't easy to answer the questions. The memories it raised from a surface layer of blissful forgetfulness were painful. Sometimes the truth – my cowardice, my more selfish motives (such as my desire to avoid administrative retribution for inaction in case the situation improved without my help), my thoughtlessness – was not the polished kind that one liked to retell. But I tried as hard as I could to own up to all of it. However shameful it was, lying about it would be worse. If Laura wanted to use it to damage me, she could have had the information anyway, or forge her own version.

 

“Why do you ask so much?” I asked Laura at the end.

“I try to understand Team Meteor's overall action.” she explained. “There has to be rhyme, reasons, and patterns. If I know them, I can fight back.”

“And why me specifically?”

“Because you seem to have engaged them most.”

 

Well, that made sense.

For some of it at least, but not really a reason why she would be interested in my motives. But what would be the point to clarify that? Did it matter?

 

“But how can I trust what you said?” she added. “You could be working for them, couldn't you?”

 

That question was more difficult, of course. How could I prove that I was genuine in a place where nobody knew me well enough to vouch for me?

 

“I have told you all the truth I could." I answered matter-of-factly. "And always in the clearest way I managed to find. But I don't know I'm not working with them. I certainly don't think so – but they have PULSEs that do feats that ought to be impossible, so how can I be sure? But if you want something more specific, think of the very start, the train accident to which I was sole survivor.”

 

I shouldn't have brought that up. The renewed realization of how close it had been was nauseating.

 

“That was just pure, absurd luck. It couldn't have been planned.” I concluded.

“Who says it has all been planned? Who says they knew what train you took? You could have already been working for them, and carried on with it, since you survived. Or you could have joined them afterwards hoping to save your life and get back home. “

 

That was theoretically true. But what kind of organization would let a covert asset like that die in a terror attack that they themselves had planned? Probably the same kind of organization that would employ a double agent steadily devoted to destroying their resources.

 

Which led to the obvious answer.

 

“If I had been working for them, they would already have won.”

 

I realized that there were several issues with the statement as I uttered it, and a look at Laura's shocked wide eyes revealed that Laura didn't care about the issues I was handwaving, but she probably realized that I had just declared myself crazier and deadlier than the crazy murderers.

 

“Let me rephrase.” I added, with my voice shaking a bit. “Given what I know of their overall capabilities, like the PULSEs and their several undercover agents; barring all the caveats that I do not know of, and in particular the limitations on these capabilities; and if I had been the sort of person to be willing to work for their ends – I think that I could have done much better than they did.”

 

Which for some reason didn't seem to improve the bad impression I had made with the previous sentence.

 

“Could you please elaborate a little bit more?”

 

And now I was trapped by my own arrogance. Of course Team Meteor had been frightfully inefficient. Showoffs, in a way, most of their threat a bluster. Like an army showcasing cannons when all they could use was iron swords. But if their enemies were still at the stone age, how relevant was the difference?

 

Suppose you wanted Pyrous Mountain to destroy its surroundings: you could just have blown hundreds of Electrode at the top, hoping to start a chain reaction leading to an eruption. That would have been more economical than set up a PULSE Camerupt, had Cal told the truth about how complicated it had been.

 

Suppose you wanted to terrify people off Reborn City: then you could just murder one entire family a day in broad daylight, exposing the powerlessness of the authorities. Or just have a PULSE Hypno or Gengar or Mismagius in a basement and broadcast the same nightmare to everyone every night. There would have been a mass exodus long before however many PULSE Muks were needed to poison the entire lake.

 

Of course, this was only one kind of means to evacuate the city. After all, they could instead have made a lot of money using the PULSE technology, either outright selling it or finding some interesting use cases, and simply bought Reborn City whole or paid for its entire relocation.

 

Or if you had a bunch of hostage children: instead of waiting with them in some random old place, you could have sold immediately their Pokemon to discrete but affluent buyers. And then used the child themselves as leverage against the authorities, one child's life for the evacuation of half a Ward. Or just as a statement, displaying their corpse for everyone to shudder. Or as bait: chain one of them in Yureyu, fill the building to the brink the explosives, and bring it down when the rescue party is inside. Killing a few birds with one stone. None of these were the most heinous things conceivable.

 

I knew that it wouldn't do to tell all these suggestions to anyone, let alone to Laura in this particular case. Even though it was (somewhat weak) evidence that I wasn't working for Team Meteor. But the gist was correct, it was simply a matter of putting it right.

 

“If I had been with them, I wouldn't have let a beginner wreck their amazing machines.”

 

And yet, that wasn't inconditionally true either, I realized. If the PULSEs were, in spite of their looks, impractical enough, it might have been a smarter plan to have someone publically wreck them to become above suspicion than to actually use them.

 

But Laura didn't press the issue, seemingly accepting my answer, and fell silent.

 

“I thank you for answering my many questions,” she eventually said, making no mention of my peculiar and ill-thought answers to her last interrogations. “I think I understand your perspective somewhat better.”

“I also came,” she added, “for a few other things. There was a PULSE Abra in the mountains.”

 

A PULSE Abra... over there?

What for?

 

“The teleportations?” I guessed. At Laura’s puzzled glance, I elaborated. “There has been random teleportations around this place in the past few days.”

“Then the machine could certainly be their origin,” Laura nodded, “although I suspect that it served another goal. Anyway, we decided to move all the children.”

“Did you? I really liked your house. And it was pretty much out of the way.”

“After our assault on the Meteor hideout,” Laura answered with a little smile, “we did not want to expose ourselves to retaliation.”

“You found a Meteor base in these parts and stormed it?” I asked, surprised. Laura nodded firmly, her smile more assured.

“No doubt that it had to be done. Saphira and I taught them a good lesson. We pummelled their alleged ace, Min or something.”

 

I nodded. It was undoubtedly good news. Spinel Town would recover, and Team Meteor would be weakened.

 

“Still, I think that Saphira will not be thrilled to see you in our little group.”

 

It wasn't a surprise. Regardless of my stated motives, I had still caused a lot of harm, and Saphira's reservations were still as strong. Experience still screamed that I was a danger to everyone else, if not myself.

 

“Do you have the sequels to Shelly's books?” Laura went on asking.

 

But that question was easy. It was fact. I nodded.

 

“Could you please hand them over to me? I will be seeing them in the afternoon, I will give them to her for you.”

 

Since she had just told me I wasn't to visit her at all, it was best that I could get Shelly the books as fast as possible, albeit through a messenger. I pulled my bag and started searching, until I found the sequels I had not given her yet. The second book of Monte-Cristo, the two later Foundations of the original trilogy, Two Towers and Return of the King.

 

Laura's raised eyebrow and expression seemed to convey a half-amused, half-incredulous “all that?”.

 

“Last thing: we recovered Heather's ring from Meteor.” Laura told me, pulling her hand in her pocket, and producing a a little golden ring with a glaring scarlet ruby in the middle.

 

Very typically for me, I only realized that Laura's nails were neither very long nor straight as she had her palm extended. Was she gnawing her nails?

 

If that even mattered? Since she came up, asked way too many painful questions, a few books and then offered me a wonderful ring that wasn't even hers? The Ruby Ring that, I vaguely remembered Corey's words, Heather would be hunted for...

 

“Where's the catch?” I asked warily, eyeing the ring with some suspicion. “This isn't even yours.”

“Heather is clearly no longer interested in it. Some in Team Meteor will go after us. They will attack all of these children again. But you were able to repeatedly thwart them. Keep us safe, Gabriel, please, and take it.”

 

Laura looked and sounded genuine. She was worried. And her argument made sense, too. I had already done so much harm to all these children by setting off the terrible mechanic that had led to their kidnapping, and even before that, Heather's father's death. But even then, I had been willing to sacrifice them for my own skin, as I had been willing to let Kiki die for my own hide. I couldn't keep hiding behind anyone.

 

And if I had to die for it, then—

 

I'd try to avoid it, of course.

 

Once a coward, always a coward.

 

“Can you just bring Serra in?” I asked Laura. She knew the Ruby Ring's history and owner, I knew it too, but there was no point in opening myself to a forged charge for receiving stolen goods, or a bureaucratic error due to Heather's own impatience.

 

Laura shrugged. It made no difference to her.

 

With Serra as a witness, I was reducing a little bit the odds against me. That wasn't touching the main danger behind it, but this one couldn't be mitigated.

 

“I think that usually rings are gifted the other way.” Serra quipped, amused.

 

Please, I thought when I realized what she was referring to. One of the understated advantages of not having Cain around had been to avoid that kind of remarks. Although Cain's usually were more explicit.

 

But my hand was still trembling as I took the ring from Laura's hand.

From now on, I would be a target.

I could be hunted on sight.

Nothing worse than I deserved.

 

 

*

 

 

Laura was a little bit puzzled when she left Spinel Town to fly for good to Calcenon. The questions and answers had been fine and the boy had been most cooperative. It could have been an act, of course, but she had found him kind, smart, and perhaps a little broken inside, which wasn't very surprising. If it was genuine, perhaps Noel's judgement would have been spot-on on whom to give his note. Getting the books for Shelly was a bonus – she hoped the once-Bug Leader would enjoy them. And who knew, perhaps she or Noel would as well.

 

He hadn't reacted at all about Lin, who had been, by Saphira's experience and pained admission, the deadliest being inside the base by far. If he had been in Team Meteor, no doubt he would have heard about her, and her powers. So either he wasn't with them, or he had an excellent control.

 

Giving him the Ruby Ring had been more important. That really made them all safer. If Gabriel was with Team Meteor, he wouldn't have any reason to go after Heather specifically, and maybe not them too. Hopefully he'd meet soon enough Cain who had gone off towards Ametrine. If not – either as straightforward as he claimed to be or playing another game – then he was going to be their lightning rod. Drawing Team Meteor away from them and towards him.

 

But there were some more disturbing marks. As Saphira had noticed, Azurine Island didn't sound right. There was something she was missing, something that would shed a different light on that story... And there was the issue of his last remarks, which gave her the creeps. He had stayed an awful lot thinking through his answers... What could he have meant? Could he really be as cold, as soul-dead as what she knew of the Meteors? She really should have pressed on further... Saphira would of course interpret it as another damning piece of evidence, and she could well be right.

 

And the surname? she remembered. Apparently there had been a one-of-its kind mistake in the paperwork, where Ame had forgotten to ask him to fill it in. And she had forgotten to ask about it, while this was a hint of a red flag to Saphira.

 

But how much sense did it all make, in the end?

 

 

*

 

“So what was that about?” Serra asked me, a bit curious and very casually, after Laura left.

 

I gave her, not without reluctant hesitation, a true version “from a certain point of view”. I had had, I explained, a strong disagreement with Saphira, which had resulted in my leaving the Belrose home, where I had been staying with the children we had rescued. Laura wanted to make her own mind about the situation, hence all the questions. And she wanted me to keep Heather's mother's ring for the time being.

 

It wasn’t a very good evasion. I was confident that Serra could ferret out the truth and the unsaid things, by asking Ame – for instance – the right questions. 

 

“So it looks like you made a good impression.”

 

The bubbling, laughing, high-pitched voice seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere in particular, and it made me shiver. I turned around nervously, trying to figure out where it came from, but threat assessment remained much more difficult among all these mirrors. But at Serra's warm, genuinely glad smile, one that seemed to illuminate her face and perhaps the entire room, I decided that I didn't need to carry on. Nonetheless, I felt disturbed at something in the voice – the symptoms felt all too uncomfortably familiar. 

 

“Gardevoir.” Serra's voice was laughing too. “I didn't expect you to come here. But don't be so shy, we're not in private.”

 

There was a blinding flash of light that seemed reflected and amplified by all the mirrors. When I opened my eyes – lo and behold – the new guest was indeed a Gardevoir. Who apparently could speak.

 

“Gabriel,” Serra made introductions. “This is Gossip Gardevoir. You may have seen her on TV.”

“Autographs are free.” Gardevoir didn't really speak, but it sounded exactly like the kind of glamorous tone of a media idol used to display a cheerful persona to whom laughter was a natural state of being. It was typically the kind of thing that such a media idol would say. And it wasn't Serra's voice.

“She doesn't really speak,” Serra explained, “but it always sounds like she is. It's some form of telepathy, I think.”

 

That set off alarm bells, because I could only find one sensible explanation, and it had some unpleasant implications. But I decided to not press the issue. I remembered Gossip Gardevoir as the interviewer in these preposterous recordings of Gym Leaders, so it couldn't be this harmful...

 

“But if it's, um, telepathy, are you, er, dubbed, on television?” I pointed out, cursing myself for my uncontollable stutter.

“Of course not!” the Gardevoir sounded indignant. “You people have throats and larynges to speak, but I have no such organs. Instead, I use telekinesis to produce sound waves that your ears recognize as an actual voice. And this is the one I have chosen.”

“Oh. Okay. Er… sorry.” I extended my hands in a placating gesture.

“I came here,” Gardevoir wasn't speaking to me. She was speaking to the entire universe, as if it were her audience and she had to liven things up, “to tell you that my Master would be the next Gym Leader for you to challenge. We will be waiting for you at Vanhanen Castle. And since you”, she added, speaking specifically to me, her voice more mischevious, “have done so many interesting things in so short an amount of time, I would be delighted to interview you.”

 

Uh…

 

“Don't look at me like that, dear,” Gardevoir kept the same cheerful voice no matter what, which was a little unnerving. “It is poor showmanship. It's only an interview, I’m certain that you will be splendid!”

 

I tried to loosen up a tiny bit, to harbor some pretense of smile. But I couldn’t. Something in Gardevoir’s very presence was rattling my brain, shaking it relentlessly and still pressing it for an answer.

 

“I can’t do that,” I muttered as an answer, my throat dry, shaking my lower head as though the action was my only anchor to the physical world. “I… failed everything.”

 

Stupid! some part of my brain was impotently screaming, like a computer user angry at his device's frozen display indicating a meltdown from the operating system. Stupid and demonstrably false! You’re giving her ammunition!

 

“My, my, someone is playing hard to get!” Gardevoir mused in a terrifyingly fake playful tone. “Surely you cannot handwave away your success at dealing with Team Meteor!”

 

I couldn’t accept this. It would be too hard to play the game, especially with the Gossip Gardevoir whose every word seemed to directly disconnect my neurons from one another. I didn’t deserve to be put on a pedestal, even a studio. But I was failing to come up with an appropriate answer – in particular not too gruesome, when Serra thankfully cut me off.

 

“Gardevoir, will you be staying for a little bit?”

“Alas no, my dearest Serra. Master and I have been challenged, and I must take my place for the battle. Another day, perhaps? As to you, Gabriel, I hope to see you soon, on the battlefield and in the studios.”

 

Gardevoir bowed to an audience that didn't exist.

 

“That's all, stay tuned!”

 

Then she vanished.

 

As uncomfortable as she made me, Gardevoir's abrupt leave seemed to turn the entire room ten degrees colder. Serra's face closed off again, giving her perhaps another decade of dreariness. Clearly, something was off for her, but it felt intrusive and disrespectful to ask about it.

 

“Since Gardevoir didn't explain,” Serra said dully, “I might as well. Route 1 is a long flat stretch of land north of here stuck between two forests. It runs eastwards from Reborn City to a rift called Iolia Valley. To reach Vanhanen Castle, you will walk northwards through the Tanzan range, and then walk eastwards until you reach Iolia Valley. Then the castle is a few kilometers away south. I think that even these days, there are places to sleep on the way, because I don't think you'll manage to go much beyond Tanzan today... The PokeMart should have maps, I guess?”

 

“Thank you.” I answered, committing it to memory. I was planning to get a map, of course, but it would help to already know the big picture.

 

And then I looked back at Serra. She looked quite grim. Weary or sad, maybe?

 

“Is there anything I can help you with?” I offered, a bit at random, perhaps because it might have been the nice thing to ask.

 

Her wince morphed smoothly into a benevolent, lips-only smile.

 

“It's fine.” she replied. “Thank you for asking.” She waved at me, a clear sign of dismissal, then frowned briefly. “Or, actually... do you mind letting me know if you get news of Bennett?”

“I can do that,” I answered uneasily, “of course.”

“Good. I'm sure he's old enough to take care of himself, but I think he underestimates how much mothers worry...” Serra trailed off.

 

I didn't answer. I was too afraid of bursting into tears myself. That would be the position my mother was in.

 

Except that she had no reason to believe I was still alive.

 

 

Player's note (1):

Spoiler

 

So. Noel should be relatively straightforward given my team. Roserade is there because Wizzard is a monster sweeper on this field, there's Blaziken for the typing and Fire bonus, there is Klinklang for Clefable and Swellow, Ampharos because Swellow too, Krookodile for Crunches and Intimidate, and Meowstic for screens.

 

I'm playing that one in set mode. I wanted to not use items, but...

 

 

There is no way this should go wrong.

 

 

Roserade holds a Grass Gem for added power. That's because Porygon-Z is itself a nuke given the kind of Pokemon that we have (aka not Blissey).

 

 

No more nuke. Five to go. The Swellow will doubtlessly Brave Bird Roserade, so the switch to Ampharos is cheap.

 

 

Ampharos's Quick Claw activates, sparing me another boosted Brave Bird (or a Facade). Watt would have certainly lived, though, but it would have made the late battle trickier.

 

 

 

Noel switches Girafarig next, so I switch to Callan.

 

 

Callan is levelled up so that Crunch is a OHKO. I think. Otherwise it wouldn't be too much of an issue.

 

 

I switch to Tech on the Bewear, for the screens, and because Psychic should help a lot. Bewear can only cause so much trouble, right?

 

 

Uh oh.

 

 

 

So that's damage from Blaziken's Double Kick. Okayy...

 

 

Oh, come on.

 

 

This is... not great.

 

 

But at least the blood is avenged. So now it's Cinccino and Clefable. Klinklang pwns Clefable, I still have Krookodile, Roserade can take a couple of hits through Reflect, so that should work out, right?

 

 

I got flinched twice. Sigh.

 

 

Krookodile is flinched again, although it did manage to Intimidate.

 

 

Roserade is no more essential, I'm afraid. Sorry, and thank you.

 

 

Then I want to Intimidate spam, but what a damage output...

 

 

And Krookodile gets another Intimidate before dying to a Bullet Seed. Sigh again.

 

 

Tech, it'd be really nice if you could set up screens again...

 

 

But he couldn't help me. This is pretty bad now.

 

 

I send out Watt, and Noel switches out his -3 Cinccino and sends Clefable in. This is not good either.

 

 

Klinklang pwns Clefable to a degree I wasn't even aware of. Good riddance to the cheater.

 

 

But now this is extra bad, because Cinccino has its normal Attack, I can't Intimidate, and both my mons are 2HKO (with good chances for flinches). 

 

 

But luck smiles upon me (Wake-Up Slap, obviously, makes contact) and there might be an out. The issue is that Klinklang is still 2HKO and that, while Klinklang is faster, its only powerful enough move for a 2HKO is Gear Grind, which is imprecise. So I decide it's better to try with Watt and heal her.

 

 

Well, it didn't work.

 

 

So I healed Klinklang instead, obviously. Now this should work, unless I get crit or miss too much. Thank you for your team spirit, Watt. 

 

 

Two Gear Grinds work, and Cinccino got fully paralyzed in between, so that was perfect.

 

 

Player's note (2);

Spoiler

And a rematch with Noel, to try and get him in set mode, with no items!

 

 

Why replace a great beginning? Roserade still outspeeds and oneshots Porygon-Z with Grass Gem-boosted field-boosted Nature Power.

 

 

Then Noel sends out Swellow, as previously, so I switch to Watt, who takes minimal damage from Brave Bird. But Static activates, which means that Watt manages to kill Swellow first thing next turn.

 

 

Noel sends out Girafarig next. Hoping for a Psychic, I send out Callan the Krookodile.

 

 

And Callan retaliates in a far more damaging fashion. 3 to 0 – but that was just the easy part.

 

 

Noel sends out Bewear, and I cannot hope for Callan to beat it. Its physical bulk is too good and its physical attack is way too dangerous. Instead, I switch out to Tech to boost my defenses – but not before the Bewear does significant damage with Hammer Arm.

 

 

Then it is the time to strike back.

 

 

This gets Bewear in the red (before field healing), so Bewear should no longer be a threat… assuming Noel doesn’t switch. Which he of course does.

 

 

It’s my turn to switch to Antum the Klinklang, as I expect a Fairy move and experience shows that this Pokemon can beat Clefable (not least because it is faster).

 

 

I’m still lucky that both Gear Grinds hit, and that Clefable’s Hidden Power Fire wasn’t a critical hit.

 

 

But the main threat still remains unchallenged, and Antum’s attempt is unlucky in that regard. But not too dangerously so.

 

 

I send Callan in to start lowering Cinccino’s Attack, as experience has shown this Pokemon to be extremely dangerous, and Reflect is not protecting my team any more.

 

 

Then I switch to Wizzard the Roserade, as I expect a Bullet Seed.

 

 

Then I send Callan back in for another Intimidate, as the Cincinno has no super effective move on him that is also effective against Wizzard.

 

 

The Cincinno just misses the Tail Slap, which is lucky, but not really game-changing.

 

 

I switch to Elidee, as I expect another Bullet Seed.

 

 

Then back to Callan, as the Intimidate effects start stacking up.

 

 

But Noel isn’t giving up and sends Bewear out. I’m not sure any more if I anticipated that move and sent Tech out, or if I just did the math to set screens up and believed the Cincinno wouldn’t kill him regardless?

 

 

Anyway, Tech is more than good enough to finish the Bewear off.

 

 

Now, I have no idea why I decided sending Callan directly back in for the Intimidate without even a Reflect. Did I do the math and expected him to barely survive?

 

 

Wizzard tanks the follow-up Bullet Seed without too many issues.

 

 

Then I send Callan back in for the final Intimidate.

 

 

And only then will I Reflect. I’m still unsure now why I played this way, but here’s a guess: a later Reflect means a longer protection against Cinccino, who can still flinch with King’s Rock.

 

 

Tech goes out fighting (haha), his Psychic dealing significant damage to our final enemy.

 

 

And then Wizzard can finish the job once and for all, because he is fearless and will not flinch.

(ironic, considering who the Wizzard is -- not the music band whose existence I just learnt). 

 

 

Done.

 

 

Character rates

Spoiler

Laura: 6+/10 (+1). She gave me a chance to explain myself. Even though it hurt. 

Serra: 7/10. No real change. Confirms my overall positive opinion, apart perhaps from that quip with the ring. 

 Gossip Gardevoir: 2/10. Just what does "she" think she's doing? She really unnerves me...

 

 

Death count:

Spoiler

Total Parts 1: 6

Total Part 2: 1

Kiki-Aya: 0

Aya-Serra: 1

Serra-Noel: 0 (although there were a few close calls)

Current Part 3: 1

Current total: 8

 

[Evi Crystal]

12 hours ago, Mindlack said:

I'm not sure who you're talking about actually. Maybe instead he'll book a session with Sigmund like a regular customer. It shouldn't be too awkward, Sigmund is a psychiatrist with some experience, he must have seen weirder at some point. 

Aha ha... I cannot image Sirius acting like a normal customer, more like they will argue with eachother given their odds despite being on the same side. Idk more with these two

 

12 hours ago, Mindlack said:

Suppose you wanted Pyrous Mountain to destroy its surroundings: you could just have blown hundreds of Electrode at the top, hoping to start a chain reaction leading to an eruption. That would have been more economical than set up a PULSE Camerupt, had Cal told the truth about how complicated it had been.

 

Suppose you wanted to terrify people off Reborn City: then you could just murder one entire family a day in broad daylight, exposing the powerlessness of the authorities. Or just have a PULSE Hypno or Gengar or Mismagius in a basement and broadcast the same nightmare to everyone every night. There would have been a mass exodus long before however many PULSE Muks were needed to poison the entire lake.

 

Of course, this was only one kind of means to evacuate the city. After all, they could instead have made a lot of money using the PULSE technology, either outright selling it or finding some interesting use cases, and simply bought Reborn City whole or paid for its entire relocation.

 

Or if you had a bunch of hostage children: instead of waiting with them in some random old place, you could have sold immediately their Pokemon to discrete but affluent buyers. And then used the child themselves as leverage against the authorities, one child's life for the evacuation of half a Ward. Or just as a statement, displaying their corpse for everyone to shudder. Or as bait: chain one of them in Yureyu, fill the building to the brink the explosives, and bring it down when the rescue party is inside. Killing a few birds with one stone. None of these were the most heinous things conceivable.

 

Bbbrrrrrr..... The shivers up my spine. Just imagined these scenes/scenarios of Team Meteor's actions makes me getting goosebumps. But given how high the apathy rate is depicted or shown in Reborn City, some citizens would probably don't care about some casualties because of the last years. Also said Pikemon were already shifted to the blackmarket, but I hope they'll be saved before it's too late.

[Aphelli]

On 12/10/2021 at 12:25 PM, Evi Crystal said:

Aha ha... I cannot image Sirius acting like a normal customer, more like they will argue with eachother given their odds despite being on the same side. Idk more with these two

 

I actually think Sirius might feel this awkward, but Sigmund wouldn't. He's a psychiatrist, they're trained to put their emotions aside and be as neutral as they can. However, I don't think Sirius has experience with awkwardness -- blood, death, pain, blackmail, betrayal, sure, but not that. 

 

I also think our favorite psychiatrist would get an inner kick out of seeing Sirius either weirded out or ranting furiously. 

 

On 12/10/2021 at 12:25 PM, Evi Crystal said:

Bbbrrrrrr..... The shivers up my spine. Just imagined these scenes/scenarios of Team Meteor's actions makes me getting goosebumps. But given how high the apathy rate is depicted or shown in Reborn City, some citizens would probably don't care about some casualties because of the last years. Also said Pikemon were already shifted to the blackmarket, but I hope they'll be saved before it's too late.

 

The Pokemon "are" on the black market indeed (quotation marks will get hopefully explained someday), but Gabriel has no reason to know this. 

I wouldn't call Reborn City's inhabitants' position "apathy", because I find the term not charitable enough. Perhaps a better wording (which is owed to Winslow) could be "moral exhaustion".

 

They've been through so much, they've internalized that something horrific can happen to them or the people around them at any moment, that the situation will eventually get worse, that they're utterly doomed and there's nothing they can do about it. Perhaps an apt metaphor could be moths -- you can keep caring about the moths you're breeding (for whatever reason) after you've seen them die night after night, but it's usually not the same. 

 

But that state of slow decay is (unfortunately) an easy state to settle in, but that doesn't mean that a more immediate pressure wouldn't make them move. 

 

(I didn't expect to end up hypothesizing this, but that "one family a day" thing might have worked a lot better and with fewer deaths than what actually happened -- might, of course)

 

On a more cheerful note: the children's Pokemon should be freed before the end of this part, so in ten chapters at most, as I never intended to deprive Anna nor Heather of their E4 teams. I just need to figure out a way for it to happen. 

 

[Aphelli]

Hi! Happy new year to all of you, and I hope that you keep healthy, safe, and find happiness and success for your endeavors of this year. 

(Am I sounding too formal? Did I weird everyone out?)

 

Uh... help I'm trapped in a cohomology factory!

(No, that won't help... Something else...)

 

Anyone else feels really bothered by the original version of the meme currently on the dev blog? 

 

 

Let's be a little bit more serious. It's quite late here, and my metaphorical mental guards protecting everyone from my particular brand of stupidity are off duty. I guess I should know better than speak (let alone update) at this time, but I wanted to manage this tonight and end this unplanned long break. 

By the way, I guess by the view counter that you keep reading the story – for which I’m both glad and grateful. 

 

I changed computers and these are the first pictures I'm editing with the new computer. It turns out that character sizes have changed, and therefore the raw sprite sizes don't fit the pictures anymore. I had to crudely make them bigger, and I suppose this shows in the image quality, in the changes in proportions... I hope that I can eventually have pictures as neat as the ones before the change.  

 

Speaking of unexpected things: I was rather taken aback by some of the dev's decisions regarding E19 (specifically, the one in the cards), and I don't think I'll adapt the story to fit them. Not in the short run anyway. 

 

I also find myself, to my dismay, rather ambivalent as to the dev's progress -- both hyped by E19's release which draws ever closer, and very disappointed and annoyed at my own lack of productivity. I'm struggling specifically with the Seventh Street arc, but I'm not even sure Agate will get easier -- Eclipse, Ametrine, Terra, the WTC and its aftermath (aka Part 4 finale as per current plan) are as many difficulties I'm not sure how to deal with. I had thought I had managed a good start with my chapter 68 draft, but let's just say that it has to be entirely rewritten. 

 

That feeling reminds me of a remark I had read in a newspaper article about minimum wages perhaps a decade ago -- raise it too much, too fast, and then workers slightly above it becoming worried about getting caught in...

 

You know what? Let's just forget I ever wrote anything before the chapter. Enjoy (hopefully)!

 

 

Chapter 63: Out of the Woods

 

Spoiler

I left Serra's Gym as it became clear that I had no more reason to stay there, and made preparations to leave town altogether. In a still very disorderly store, I managed to buy maps and a cheap compass, the better to check my way. Serra had been right: it was probably safer to climb across the Tanzan Mountains and walk along Route 1 than to go eastwards towards the rift called Iolia Valley and walk upstream to the castle.

 

Naturally, I still had no intention of staying there for half a second more than necessary. An invitation to lunch or dinner? That was strange. Suspicious. And given all the insanity I had lived through in the past fifteen days, I didn't feel inclined to indulge.

 

It was with this in mind that I planned my trip, making the necessary purchases. It would take the rest of the day to hike across Tanzan Mountain, and hopefully I would find one of the shacks indicated on the map to sleep. It would probably be bare, but even that would be good enough.

 

I didn't stay for lunch, either. I set out as soon as I could, with my fortunately mostly dry sleeping bag, a new change of cheap clothes, a cheaper coat, and enough food and water for three days, just in case. That made the bag big, and heavy too, but I hoped that it would be manageable. If anything, I could use a little bit more of a normal sport, such as hiking.

 

The path led me first west through the leafless Chrysolia Forest, but soon twisted north as the slope got steadily steeper and every step became harder to walk. But I knew that I couldn't stop -- if I did, it would get that much harder to start again.

 

Hiking reminded me of my younger brother Michael and my father. They would have enjoyed it – its clear, cool weather, the overall pretty sight, even though it lacked a little green to my taste, and how unexploited, how little industrialized nature was all around us; the surrounding silence, and the physical exertion. I wasn't like them in this respect: I was forcefully controlling my breathing, walking in tiny, unbalanced bends just to keep going in the slope, wishing with all my anemic willpower to ignore how tired my legs already felt, and very soon I couldn't care less about the surrounding wilderness.

 

But it could be the loneliness and the weight of the bag speaking. After all, if, in some much more pleasant parallel universe, we had been vacationing together in the area, I would have been glad to hike with them.

 

Speaking of loneliness, I thought, as my mind seized any possible distraction from the burden I was enduring, I deserved a prize or something. In the fifteen days I had spent in this place where I had not known anyone, I had ended up without any actual contact. Or more accurately, without any means of communicating with the very few people that I had met who would agree to answer a hypothetical call from me.

 

Team Meteor wanted me (and everyone else, certainly – not much of a comfort) dead, Cal had gone to the ground, Victoria hated me with good reason, Saphira wouldn't be pleased if I happened to be mere kilometers away from her or hers, Ame and the Reborn-living members of the League had to keep some plausible deniability for the Orphanage. So that potentially left Amaria, Cain, Aya, Hardy, and Fern. Amaria's desire for self-preservation would certainly signal her to stay away from me, Fern wasn't pleasant company, the only thing I had in common with Aya was self-esteem issues, and I had probably even less in common with Cain or Hardy.

 

In nineteen years of being the socially awkward outsider, the odd one out at the very fringe of the few social groups I actually engaged with, I summarized with a little inner scoff, I had never managed to end up quite this isolated.

 

And of course it turned out that I had been slower than I had expected, or perhaps that I had underestimated the length of my path. Fortunately, I wasn't lagging too far behind the plans, I had Leaf walk with me, and the path was fortunately uncomplicated.

 

The night had fallen long ago when I found the deserted, tiny shack that would shelter me. But it didn't prevent me from eating a rudimentary dinner, made of berries, raw vegetables, drying bread and canned fish, yet probably healthier than most of my previous meals, and I was eager to lie down afterwards.

 

*

 

I had been lying down for a while when I realized that there was a pattern of nearby footsteps drowned in the usual nocturnal noises of cold mountains. I knew that someone was pacing nervously around the cabin, but not daring to reveal themselves.

 

My extremities and my heavy eyes protested as I got clear from the warmth of my sleeping bag and stood up instead: if something unexpected happened here, I didn't want to be caught half-asleep. Yet being upright gave me only a little more safety: if Team Meteor had finally decided to come for me, they simply could set the place on fire and snipe at me if I somehow made it out. If they were indeed here, I wasn't going to gain anything by anticipating an attack and getting outside. With the bag, I would be too heavy to move – without it, I wouldn't get far enough to evade them. So, cold and tired, I waited for whatever was outside to come.

 

I didn't expect it to be an emaciated shape, hidden in the darkness. I wished I had thought of taking the headlight, but I didn't want to not face it, even for a moment.

 

“I found you now.” Its voice was an ugly, hoarse whisper, but one able to worm its way through the shadows and into my ears.

 

I froze. I knew that voice.

 

“What have I ever done to you?” the whisper was louder and sorrowful now.

 

The shadow took a couple of steps towards me, so that I could make out its features – not without a shudder. It looked like a short-haired rather short woman, but it looked shrivelled somehow, almost dehydrated, and there was a wide cut on its throat.

 

“I gave you a roof. I offered to protect you from your enemies!” the voice was louder, raucous and accusatory. 

“What do you want?” my voice was quivering to my ears.

"You've never known what it means, do you?" the shadow kept advancing, and I had no defense against a ghost. A Ghost-type Pokemon, maybe. But the ghost of...

“You let me die!” it shrieked. I felt the words stab me, almost literally. “Do you know what it's like?”

 

It kept advancing on me and I knew, looking at its too human eyes, that there was nothing I could do.

 

“You watch your blood run out of your body. Like water from a pierced water skin. You feel empty… Light-headed... Cold... Detached... There was so much that I could have done, so much that I wanted to do...”

 

“What...” I tried, not very effectively, to steady my voice. People, or whatever is considering to harm you, react to confidence, or so I had read. In fiction, of all places. Meaning that someone who lacked it was weak. A target. “What are you here for?”

 

“I wanted...” Kiki's ghost spat, “I wanted to see what good you did with the life you stole from me!”

 

The moon suddenly shone in the window of the cabin, illuminating a much smaller shadow that stood to this ghost's side. It was a slim young girl whose hair I couldn't see well, her head slightly bowed, her back slightly bent, her arms clenched against her body.

 

“You let them take us.” the second shadow's voice wasn't even accusatory, or angry. It was just sad. Almost puzzled. “You knew who they were. We waited for so long to be freed. Do you know what they did?” Shelly's avatar sniffed, unmistakable horror making her tiny voice stutter.

 

“You didn't care one bit, did you?” Kiki talked again, like a prosecutor out for blood. “You just wanted to feel good, because you had done something about it. But not to the point of risking yourself. No, you carefully surrounded yourself with as many powerful allies as you thought could shield you.”

 

“They would have killed us otherwise.” I protested dimly, but my heart wasn't in it. I was digging my own grave.

 

“My point exactly.” Kiki snapped contemptuously.

 

“But even in this horrid building, you were ready to let them hit me. Kill me.” Shelly insisted, her voice tearful. She was going to make me cry, I thought dully. “Why? I thought you were nice... You had given me books... You were telling me stories... You had been helping us out with Heather... Did you decide that you hated me? Like everyone does?”

 

“I...” my throat was dry. It shouldn't have been this hard to tell the truth. It was cold, for certain, but it was no less true that, had we surrendered, this would not have helped any of the children a bit.

 

“Look at him, Shelly, honey.” Kiki carried on, with as much pity as I deserved, “Listen to his floundering. I know it's hard to accept, but you have to understand. Like so many people, he does not care for you. Or for anyone else, except for his precious skin. You can see it in his eyes, who never look at anyone. You can see in his nonexistent friends, or in the family that he left halfway across the world.”

 

*

 

I awoke with a start, panting and tears running from my eyes. And, above all, I was disturbed, not only at what I had seen, but because the night was eerily silent all around me. There should have been some wind, some leaves blowing, some Pokemon moving around, even some wood creaking.

 

But no. A breath that I struggled to steady echoed loudly in my ears, and the feeling of the blood mounting to my head were the only things that I could hear. On the upside, there was no unnatural moonlight in the room and the door of the shack looked closed, as I had left it.

 

Even then, I was instinctively certain that I wasn't alone, no matter what my reason told me. I couldn’t see it. I couldn’t hear it. But I could feel it in the bone-deep cold pervading the room, and properly dread it. There was, there had to be someone else staying still in the room. A presence which made this deafening silence so heavy and so unnerving. I didn’t dare move, lest I discovered I was unable to.

 

Stop it, I found myself thinking, which was stupid on several levels. First, whoever was behind it was probably not listening to my thoughts. Second, it would likely not have obeyed anyway, unless it was backed up by strength, which I was lacking. My arms remained clutched against my uncontrollably trembling body and my legs felt numb.

 

There was someone else in the room. I couldn't see it, but it was there. Waiting for something. And even though I had no prayer of fighting it off, not in this half-frozen state of mine, I couldn't ignore it and go back to sleep.

 

*

 

I had supposed that the hike for the following day would be much easier, because I had done all the climbing up the previous day. But because of my heavy bag and restless night, descent was a different strain on my knees and ankles, where a single careless step could sprain an articulation and turn this little trip from 'sport' into 'genuinely dangerous and painful', even though it would still pale in comparison to the bouts of insanity I had survived so far.

 

Fortunately, the clear weather was a help, as it limited how deceptively slippery the footing of the half-stony, half-muddy path could get. The downside was that whatever sliver of charm the landscape had still had yesterday wasn't affecting me anymore, and that, lacking a good book, an interesting math problem to mull over – I didn't really want to dwell on the many issues of my current situation – or even a travel companion, the walk was simply boring. Necessary, but boring, not different from any ordinary chore – those I remembered only too well shirking at home.

 

It took several uneventful hours to finally cross the range, and reach what should be another leafless forest – north of Tanzan Mountains this time – the Adventurine Woods. I was warily confident that I wasn't wrong, because the layout of the paths and crossings seemed to roughly match the plan at the spot where I thought I was.

 

But the Adventurine Woods weren't my goal for the day. Following them eastwards would bring me closer to Vanhanen Castle and Agate City, but the more exposed Route 1 should be easier to tread on, and, more importantly, had at least a couple of solid facilities where a wandering Trainer could stay. While it wouldn't be any close to great, but it should be at least as good as the cabin from last night – very possibly better, since the night would hopefully be a lot quieter.

 

So, I walked across the woods until I arrived on Route 1. According to the map, it was a straight line in both directions, surrounded on both sides by woods. But what I saw was a rocky, irregular stretch with a correct line of sight, mostly covered in varying levels of grass, only interrupted by sparse stretches of taller greenery and sparser trees.

 

The sun was noticeably declining when I reached one of the facilities where, perhaps, I could spend the night. It wasn't a very appealing sight: its bare concrete walls were stained, cracked, the small windows were dirty and many of them were at least scuffed.

 

Was it really wise to spend a night there, with all my cash and Heather's ring?

 

The thought hadn't occurred to me beforehand, but it was hardly unexpected. That matter could wait. Certainly, I could take some measures: for instance, I hid the ring in a sock.

 

So, after making sure that there was some room available, and paying in advance the cheap enough fee for the space and the clunky appliances at the worn, impersonal, "lobby" (including a computer that really shouldn't be working but apparently still did), I went back outside to get my Pokemon a bit of air and exercise.

 

This time, I opted to almost entirely switch my team around. Batley the Swoobat worked on her flight, on remaining nimble and able to switch directions in an instant, on her accuracy somewhat, and above all on her power. I tried to get her to give a few directions to another flying Pokemon I had caught very long ago, Hulu the Noibat. She was currently too weak to evolve, but could still learn and practice. Some of the principles were applicable to Elidee, who was mostly a flier, if one who preferred staying low to the ground and make a lot of light.

 

Mouse the Stoutland was a physical attacker, thus it was even more important for her to be stronger, swifter, to engage and disengage from her foes better, while she tried to show the ropes to a stubborn and slightly over-enthusiastic, but eager Callan. I found that Klinklang was suited as Mouse's partner, for it could easily withstand the Stoutland’s assaults, and strike back should Mouse give an opening.

 

As training sessions went, it wasn't a very long one, because soon enough the night was falling, and after a day of walking with this still stupidly heavy bag, I was tired.

 

Still wish I had a book, though.

 

 

*

 

Only the following day did I find that I had been staying in the same place as Fern. Not that he had noticed me before I found him, in a clearing not far from the building. A bag that looked much smarter than mine was sitting near his feet, seemingly covered by a neatly folded dark brown overcoat. His warm dark green jacket, thick black trousers, and his boots looked made for wilderness. They also looked strikingly clean.

 

And he was battling another Trainer amidst a dozen watching and cheering young people. But it wasn't really a contest. Fern's Roserade was toying with its opponent, a Passimian. The other Pokemon was panting, uncoordinated. It launched itself at the Grass-type in fury, but the Bouquet Pokemon was faster, its footing light and confident. The blows just never landed where the Roserade was. And instead of retaliating, it was turning around the battlefield, beckoning its furious enemy, taunting it.

 

It was less a battle than bullfighting. The Passimian's Trainer was getting redder and angrier at each one of his Pokemon's failed attempt, until he started screaming:

 

“Just stop playing around and start fighting already!”

 

 

Only the mocking sneer of the spectators answered him, amidst their laughter at the Passimian's performance. Fern was clearly used to play with his crowd, and he let them have their fun. Until I saw a different sort of smirk cross his face.

 

“Roserade, finish it off.”

 

The Roserade froze in place, then addressed a supremely contemptous flourish at its simian opponent. It snarled in anger and tried to rush it. The Grass Pokemon brought its enemy down with a single Extrasensory mid-leap, and then won the fight with the blast of an Energy Ball.

 

“What a loser.” Fern sneered, attuned to the jeers of the others – or, more accurately, the majority of them. Some of the others didn't look this way. 

 

“Oh, another scrub!” he added with affected surprise and a handwave of debatable candor, turning to me. “How's the lagging behind, Gabriel?”

 

I didn't have to answer this. It would be sensible not to. But I was free to walk away any time that I could, and Fern wasn't exactly impressing me one way or the other.

 

“Good morning to you too, Fern.” I answered, aiming for pleasant, just in case it could help. “But am I really lagging behind?” I objected. “I seem to have caught up with you.”

 

“No you haven't.” Fern snapped back. “I'm going for the next Badges in Agate Circus and Calcenon. I've got eight already. How about you?”

 

“Six,” I counted.

 

“So, last time we met,” Fern smirked, “you asked to delay our battle because you were in a hurry. Now, you don't look rushed at all. So are you going to chicken out?”

 

I could refuse, and it would probably be a good idea. Fern was now supposedly significantly stronger than I was, and quite skilled too. Yet, if I didn't fight at all outside my comfort zone, how could I learn to beat Gym Leaders who would have seen it all, on their own turf? And, indeed, I remembered offering Fern a rematch. A statement I had no intention of reneging on, unless there was a better reason.

 

“Cat got your tongue?” he chuckled mockingly. 

 

I saw a snicker in the group of spectators. They could be a problem, if I lost.

 

“Okay...” I answered carefully, wondering whether it would be wiser to forfeit before I lost, so as to preserve some fighting capacity until I could heal my Pokemon. “Just let me switch up my team, please?”

 

Indeed, with little Morphism that I intended to train, and the not-even-remotely-ready Elidee and Callan, I wasn’t ready for a challenge on the scale of the one Fern was issuing me.

 

“So that you can spring a cheap gimmick and win? Nope.”

 

“I don't have my best Pokemon on me.” I countered. “Are you really afraid of the Pokemon that earned me only six Badges? Two less than yours?”

 

Fern's eyes widened. It had been a shot in the dark from me, a very unusual – and cheap – remark by my own standards. I had said it because it was, in my opinion, more likely to do the trick than an appeal to reason. Although the drawback was that Fern was now fighting for ego, which was not a good thing.

 

Or perhaps it was, I wondered. Perhaps this would weaken Fern's focus, let him make mistakes. Make the battle a more even one.

 

 

*

 

“Come on,” Fern drawled, as he was standing some ten meters away from me. “You draw first.”

“To give you an advantage?” I replied, slightly incredulous. “Let's do this simultaneously.” I offered.

 

To show that I was genuine, I drew out one Pokeball, readying myself to throw it, and waited.

Fern mimicked me with visible reluctance.

 

“One,” I counted aloud. “Two...”

 

I sent Meowstic out on the count of three. Fern had decided to open with a bulky-looking Fraxure. So, a Dragon, not fully-evolved, but potentially still powerful...

 

“Reflect!” I commanded.

“Dragon Dance!” he called.

 

Fern was starting off strongly. With just a couple more Dragon Dances, the Pokemon would become unstoppably strong, and fast. The Fraxure's motions managed to be both graceful and angry, vaguely reminiscent of a haka that wasn’t playing to a crowd, while Tech, frowning in focus, erected a psychic barrier that would protect him and his teammates. It went on dancing as I recalled Tech to send out Sicy, trusting her to withstand the incoming blows and reply by herself.

 

The Fraxure struck in a furious rush ending in a cartwheel, its shiny tail hitting with distressing speed the Snowstorm Pokemon who grunted in pain, but kept her metaphorical cool and froze off said tail with a well-timed Ice Beam.

 

“Attack again, Fraxure!” Fern ordered.

 

I wasn't sure Sicy could take another one of these boosted attacks. Instead, I sent Mouse out. The massive dog Pokemon drew herself on her paws, growling, upon appearing on the field, making the Fraxure miss a step.

 

“Take Down!” I ordered.

 

Dog and Dragon clashed against one another. Mouse won, because the Ice Beam had weakened the Fraxure.

 

“That was just a taster.” Fern sneered. “Roserade, go!”

 

Fern's graceful toreador came back on the field, beckoning at Mouse now, twisting its body around in a mocking dance. I remembered how fast the Pokemon had been. Mouse wasn't good enough to turn the bullfighting around. More importantly, it was a waste of time to try so, because each passing second weakened Tech's Reflect.

 

“Scared already?” Fern chuckled at my indecisiveness. “Show him real fear, Roserade! Energy Ball!”

 

 

So I returned Mouse to her Pokeball and sent Leaf out. The Blaziken might have been fast enough to play Fern's Roserade at its own game, but she wasn't ready as she came onto the field, and the Roserade's attack hit her in her legs. Disdaining the blow, Leaf sprung up, bright little flames popping all along her limbs, and shot towards the Roserade.

 

But it wouldn’t be fast enough. Expecting the Roserade to gracefully dodge and retaliate with a devastating Extrasensory, I recalled Leaf mid-jump and sent out Tech who shrugged the attack off and set up a Light Screen.

 

“Stop playing hide and seek!” Fern exclaimed, exasperated.

“Your Roserade seemed to enjoy playing games so much!” I replied with an amusement that I shouldn't have felt.

 

Fern’s answer was a growl, but he replaced Roserade with an angry Krookodile that I was not eager to challenge. Fortunately, Leaf was absolutely in the mood for battling, and, thanks to Tech’s screens, her kicks trumped the Krookodile's tricks and Ground-type attacks.

 

Fern recalled his Pokemon, grumbling, while Leaf was waiting, panting. I had the nominal advantage, I knew, but Fern's team was faster and stronger, and at least four of my Pokemon had taken damage, two of them significantly so. When I lost the defensive advantage the screens offered me, this would go downhill.

 

Fern knew it, too. He recalled Krookodile and clearly took his time choosing his next Pokeball. His Pokemon surged on in a lean, green blur, striking Leaf barely after she realized that the fight had resumed. I switched her out immediately, as she couldn't win this battle, and sent out Watt the Ampharos instead.

 

Watt was the perfectly enemy to Fern's Scyther. She was strong enough to resist its moves, and her static electricity made it dangerous for the Bug type to make physical contact. Moreover, while she was far slower than the Scyther, any one of her electric attacks would be a finishing blow.

 

 

Which is why, as I should have known, Fern replaced his Pokemon with a Rhydon, completely reverting the balance of power and grounding the Discharge that Watt had launched. There wasn't a point in keeping Watt on the battlefield, so I called her back, and sent out Mouse instead.

 

I didn't expect her to win. Instead, I figured that Sicy would be enough to defeat the Rhydon, provided Mouse could weaken it. Both parts of the plan worked out pretty well, to Fern's increased annoyance, certainly not sated by the Scyther's swift and merciless revenge on Sicy.

 

Fern expected my bringing in Watt, and immediately called his Roserade forth, who could shrug off all of Watt's moves – Discharge and Power Gem, while its own were more impressive, both stronger and faster, and the Light Screen had faded.

 

But Batley could probably take on the Roserade's attacks. Fern’s star team member was good, but, given the state of Fern's team, it was probably not good enough to defeat an airborne Pokemon, with boosted Psychic and Flying attacks.

 

Batley yelped in surprise as the first Energy Ball hit her as she exited her Pokeball, but remained silent as a second, furious attack struck her while she was focusing her mind. And then it was the Roserade's turn to scream in anguish as the Psychic attack struck her head-on.

 

 

And the Roserade fell.

 

“Fucking cheater.” Fern spat, disgusted.

 

Batley was faster and quicker than Leaf, so she managed to dodge Fern's Scyther's attack, while I called her back, letting Watt deal with the creepy winged bug once and for all.

 

“Not bad.” Fern grumbled. Not bad? I was leading four to one! “But your team is pretty tired. While my best Pokemon” – he smirked – “is itching for payback.”

 

I knew that I wasn't out of the woods when Fern sent out his Decidueye. Long ago, it had been a Dartrix that I had handled easily – but now, it was stronger and in better shape than any of my Pokemon. Had it been an important battle, I would have made my team gang up on it, forcing it to divide its attention and to take damage. But it was a fair battle, so I couldn't.

 

Instead, I did what I could. Watt had just enough strength left to let out a Thunder Wave that curbed its agility. Tech was quick enough to set up new psychic screens, even use Psychic, and I thought the battle won until the Arrow Quill Pokemon took him down with a powerful Spirit Shackle at an unbelievably long range. Batley didn't even get a hit in, as it used Shadow Sneak to finish her off, the Roserade's attacks having taken a heavy toll on the Swoobat.

 

In the end, it came down to the original duel, starter against starter, Blaziken against Decidueye. The Decidueye was weakened, crippled, and, while Leaf was tired, she had the type advantage, and she had screens to protect her.

 

I got lucky. Leaf was determined enough, still strong enough, protected enough, focused enough, for her fiery kicks to matter, and the Decidueye was weary enough that Leaf was able to deflect or outright dodge most of its moves.

 

I won. Barely.

 

“Cheap bastard.” he snarled, stomping away immediately, to what I realized dimly was the jeers of the audience, that I had somehow managed to not notice. “Try not to fight like a coward next time.”

 

Tough luck, Fern, I thought. That was the one thing I knew I wouldn't cease to be. Some of it overlapped with sanity, to some of which I still believed I had a claim – avoiding the stand-up fights that I knew I would lose – but there was a line somewhere.

 

A line I knew I had far crossed, long ago.

 

 

Fern battle:

Spoiler

Here’s the next battle against Fern. I’m somewhat comfortable level-wise, and Fern’s team isn’t that scary, so I’m expecting it to go well.

For this fight, I have Blaziken (probably a mistake because of the rain), Noivern, Roserade, Stoutland (for the Intimidate), Vanilluxe (for the Ice weakness) and Meowstic (the screens). 

 

 

It’s on.

 

 

This is a one-shot, as confirmed by any damage calculator.

 

 

Same.

 

 

This one is a lot more tricky, because Decidueye is a good mon and Leaf Blade is basically deadly. But I know I’m faster and I’m confident I can deal with my other mons with the rest of his team. So I order Sicy to take one for the team.

 

 

That’s blatant haxx, but I’m taking it.

 

 

And Sicy has done half the job on her own.

 

 

I switch to Roserade on the incoming Brick Break. Fire Fang was a possibility but I thought it unlikelier because of the rain so I took the chance.

 

 

Boom.

 

 

I flee the battle of equals with Fern’s Roserade. Tech’s a much safer choice, since Fern’s Roserade has a better moveset than mine, and since the incoming Extrasensory isn’t effective.

 

 

First things first, ensure my protection.

 

 

Wow. At least I still can put a Psychic in, right?

 

 

Well, no. I didn’t realize that Roserade was so fast – even though I’ve used it myself!

 

 

But it’s basically over by now. Fern only has Scyther and Roserade, neither of them outspeeds or hurts Noivern, and Hulu has the super effective Air Slash.

 

 

Fern makes an unexpected (and pointless) switch.

 

 

All is said.

 

 

Easy enough, all in all.

 

[Aphelli]

Hi! 

I hope you're doing well.

 

Last time, I didn't write, but certainly thought,  that I wanted to release new chapters more often. Obviously, I didn't. There are many things I failed to do this month as well: my math progress is real but several times too slow by any reasonable estimate, I barely got any writing done (thank you Azzie by the way), and even my teaching is proving subpar. There are 24 hours in a day and it's a miracle I am able to waste so many of them. Sigh...

 

Meanwhile, mathematicians are improving their craft, writers are polishing their works and delivering, and Reborn is getting readier by the day. 

 

Also, physical, boots-on-the-ground war is back in Europe and it looks bad overall, so why again am I complaining? 

 

Anyway, this chapter isn't among the bad things I did last month, mostly because the draft was done long before -- only the editing remained. I have no idea how it turned out -- this arc is highly frustrating to write and therefore my brain yells that anything I produce is rubbish. I can only hope that you'll be better judges. 
 

Let me state again that I am glad to see any comments or feedback (even negative ones, as long as they are articulate). 

 

 

Chapter 64: Sicilian Opening

 

Spoiler

I was dazedly trying to wake myself up after another uneasy night with a small cup of a scalding hot liquid that fancied itself as coffee in the buzzing lobby of the Pokemon Center of Agate City, when someone slapped my shoulder with the bemused words:

 

“Busy night, huh?”

 

My bag was safely – mostly – locked in my small room in the Center, but I wasn’t letting out of my grasp, for obvious reasons, most of the money I had, my Pokemon and Heather's ring. So I turned abruptly, my hand on a Pokeball, ready to instantly flee, before I recognized the voice and the face. Given the comment, I should have known who it emanated from.

 

“Wow, sorry.” Cain said, a little bit alarmed. “I didn't mean to scare you.”

“Sorry for reacting this way,” I apologized. “I'm just a little on edge, these days.”

 

Cain, on the other hand, looked better. His purple-dyed hair and his makeup looked a lot neater, he had ended up painting his nails purple, and his face bore far fewer traces of the pummeling he had endured as a captive on Azurine Island. A small light blue stone was dangling from his left earring, and he had acquired a fine gilded chain which he was wearing around his neck.

 

In other words, he was thriving.

 

“So, where have you been?” he asked. “One second you're there, and then the next one you're gone. You could have said goodbye.” He added, ostensibly joking, but I wondered if it wasn't forced.

 

I should have expected that line of questioning, but my mind came blank. I didn't want to point fingers – Saphira and Laura's decision had been reasonable enough, given the circumstances.

 

“It's complicated.” I finally decided to bail out. “And you?”

“I'll tell you on the way to Radomus's Gym,” he answered cheerfully. “You're still doing the League, right?”

 

I realized that once again I hadn't been able to keep a smooth face when hearing information that displeased me, so I forced my frown off my face.

 

“Yes, I'm still doing the League. And yes, that castle is my next step.” I confirmed, concealing my unease at the idea of meeting Gossip Gardevoir again.

 

But it would be a better idea to go there with Cain than alone, no question about it. Gossip Gardevoir would focus herself less on making me cringe specifically. Her attention would have to be shared. And perhaps Cain's presence would help me keep a composure, although that was far from certain.

 

“Okay,” I agreed, “let's go together. Let me just pack my things.”

 

I winced as I swallowed the foul, black, still too hot liquid improperly called coffee. Not that I liked the real thing very much either.

 

 

 

*

 

“So, where did you go? It seems to have done you a lot of good.” I asked Cain.

 

We were near the southern border of Agate City, and would keep on walking south for a good hour before we reached our destination.

 

“Well, I stayed at the Belrose Mansion for a couple more days after you left.” Cain explained. “I guess I got to know all these kids a little better. But they didn’t stay long, because Laura found the Doctor in the vicinity Monday morning. And Anna got sick again, too. She's better now,” he hastily added, looking at my concerned face.

 

“But Heather flew away on her own. She went to Ametrine, further north and higher up in the mountain. The Flying-type Gym Leader – Ciel, she works at the Circus – was with the children, but she couldn't take care of them all and go after Heather. When she caught up with her, Heather had found herself a guardian and was adamant she wouldn't come back, so Ciel gave in.”

 

“But,” I guessed from his tone and his expression, “you didn't.”

 

“Sure.” he approved. “I didn't want her to be on her own. So I left the Belrose Mansion on Tuesday in the evening to go see her. I got to the circus on Thursday and Ciel lent me one of her fliers to help me to Ametrine.”

 

So, he had arrived to Agate about a day before me. Four days ago.

 

“How's Heather?” I asked. She had been mute, barely reacting to the outside world, disturbed enough to leave Belrose Mansion in the middle of the night.

 

“She's speaking again, at least.” Cain chuckled sadly. “She yelled at me practically the minute she saw me and didn't stop until I was gone. Something bothered me about her guardian, though,” Cain went on, “but I let it go, because I thought they got along pretty well and he seemed decent enough. But enough about me. What happened to you? You said it was complicated, but now we have all the time.”

 

“True,” I answered. I had avoided the question, but I couldn't leave it hanging forever. “What did they tell you?” I asked.

 

If the cover story was innocuous enough, I didn't have to deny it. Laura and Saphira had ample reason for their actions, no matter how much they hurt me. Plus, I didn't really have a right to complain in this matter: I hadn't been the kidnapped one, the shocked one, or even the beaten-up one. Just a wanderer chancing (or so to speak) on a battlefield, and lucky – and cowardly – enough to not end up hurt.

 

“They said you wanted to go on fighting the League.” Cain cut my train of thought off.

 

“That's not really what happened.” I finally decided to answer. “Saphira had decided I was a threat to the place. So she lured me out and flew me up in the distance in the Tanzan range and then left me there.”

 

“Wow.” Cain whistled. “So that's why she was asking all these questions about what had happened to us. She just wanted dirt on you.”

 

That didn't surprise me.

 

“Laura came to Spinel Town last Wednesday. She asked me another round of questions about what had happened to me. She was really well-informed.”

 

“Now I'm really disappointed.” Cain went on sadly. “They were so nice when I stayed with them in Calcenon, too. I didn't think they were like that.”

 

“They had their reasons.” I replied with comparable sadness. “Remember, I was the only person not with you who knew of the children's location when the Meteors kidnapped them. And when we rescued them with Aya and Hardy, they were expecting us, and I was the only unknown quantity in the group. I let Kiki die to save my skin. You saw that.” I added in a tiny voice.

 

Cain didn't answer at once.

 

“Are you trying to tell me something?” Cain eventually asked, his voice somber.

 

“Just that they had reason to think I could be dangerous.” I shook my head sadly. “But I'm not what they think I could have been. I don't have any links to Team Meteor that I know of, I don't serve their aims and I'm certainly not shilling for them.”

 

*

 

It was a little bit of walk under a light rain and a cloudy sky before we finally saw Vanhanen Castle, a small fort built on top of a hill. As a dwelling, however, the main keep was massive, with heavy stone walls and several round tall towers in the corners, and its domain, surrounded by thick walls at least ten meters tall with crenelations, could be as big as two kilometers in diameter.

 

An obvious problem presented itself as we reached the walls themselves: we could not progress, unless we climbed them, since, as far as we could see, there was no entrance towards the castle.

 

“~So look who's finally showed up?” a cheerful, ringing voice chuckled.

 

My blood ran cold. My first encounter with the creature whom it belonged to had been extremely uncomfortable and I had little fortitude for the prospect of a repeat.

 

“You have kept us waiting long, Gabriel, but my Master and myself are always eager to entertain someone such as you.” She turned towards me, and I barely repressed an urge to step back. “And what a TV guest you would make.” The voice slightly switched its tone, becoming more mock-pensive, “with perhaps a bit of make-up to hide these shadows under your eyes.”

 

I took a deep breath and forced my worries into the back of my brain and summoned my scant assertiveness instead. But Cain cut me off as I opened my mouth.

 

“Gardevoir!” he protested playfully. “I'll be a better guest for your show. But right now, could you indicate us the way to the castle?”

 

“I'm inviting you on my show when you sing for me!” she answered, mock-heatedly. “My Master's castle is at the other end of the vegetal maze. The entrance is a little walk away this way,” she vaguely waved away, and a tiny will-o'-the wisp trailed westwards before the Gardevoir casually dispelled it.

 

“I'll see you on the other side!” Gossip Gardevoir greeted us a temporary goodbye. “You better be ready for the numerous questions your audience has for the both of you!”

 

 

Finding our way in the maze was a lot more fun than I expected it to be. The hedges were well-trimmed and tall enough to prevent us from seeing the castle most of the time, so soon afterwards, we had lost all sense of direction, trying ways mostly at random to see whether they would pan out, whether they would let us catch a glimpse of the castle and let us assess whether or not it had got closer.

 

We could have made the exploration a deterministic hike by following the right-hand side hedge wherever it went, of course, but where was the fun in that? Where was the fun, too, in asking Batley or the hyperactive Elidee (who wasn’t currently with me) to come on out and find, from above, the best course? 

 

“There's one thing I don't quite understand though, Gabriel.” Cain asked me somewhere deep in the maze.

 

“Yes?” I asked, exhilarated by the discovery without stakes, and equally by the repeated meaningless failures and the small advances that we ran into.

 

“You've done some pretty impressive things, all in all.”

 

I froze in place, all my cheer forgotten.

 

“That was dumb luck most of the time. Fear helped, I guess.” I answered cautiously.

 

“But you still went alone, on Azurine Island, to rescue me. You were aware of the danger in doing so, but you still came with us on top of Mount Pyrous. And you stared at that boss of theirs and lied to his face, pulled the wool over all of our eyes.”

 

“It was a stupid thing to do.” I answered. “The reason why I'm alive is because I let Kiki die instead.”

 

“But that's not what I'm talking about. You faced that murderous bastard for real and you let him believe that he held all the cards, only to have us all escape while still protecting the Academy.”

 

Hearing it phrased thusly hurt. It was Kiki who had protected her Academy, everyone inside, and myself, to the sacrifice of her own life, while I had just applied a desperate ploy cooked-up in five minutes that probably hadn't accomplished anything that Cal wouldn't have done.

 

“What I mean is, you've got a lot of courage. So why are you afraid of Gossip Gardevoir?”

 

That was a very good question, and I wasn't quite sure about the answer.

 

“I mean, she’s all babble, like on her TV show. There's no reason to be afraid of her!”

 

Indeed, there shouldn't have been any reason why I reacted so badly to the Gardevoir's attitude and its voice. There was something in it that was creeping its way past my veneer of sociability into my more private mental regions like a small trickle of acidic water eating away at layers of rock.

 

Perhaps it was her very interest in me that made me uncomfortable, or her tendency to put me on the spot. Perhaps really it was its insisting on an interview that I certainly didn't want to give – if anything, because I had nothing to say that I could back up, and because I was a murderer by inaction, not a paragon.

 

But it didn't quite make sense, when I thought about it. I would have been similarly unnerved at such a prospect before all of this began. Maybe something in the Gardevoir’s presence felt so fundamentally alien to me specifically that it made me believe I didn’t belong in this world. Or it was something else, less flimsy than what a few seconds of sleep-deprived introspection could yield.

 

“I don't know,” I finally answered lifelessly. “That’s a good question. I really don't know.”

 

 

Vanhanen Castle grew ever more impressive as we got steadily closer. It was a large medieval-looking stone structure, with taller round towers at the edges, surrounded by a moat about three meters deep and maybe five meters wide. Fortunately, there was a literal drawbridge near one huge entrance of the castle, guarded by a long, slim man all in scarlet, with a top hat of the same color, and a slightly amused expression.

 

“Greetings, young masters.” he said in too formal a tone for his little grin, taking his hat off, and waving his cane, crowned by a Pokeball prop, at us. “My name is Radomus, and I am the owner of this house. May I show you inside?”

 

Somehow it felt normal that someone who had decided to live in such an ancient relic had so unusual an outfit. I glanced at Cain, and we agreed.

 

“Very well. Then, come along, if you please.” he waved at us, and we followed him, cautiously walking on the center of the uncomfortably slippery drawbridge, owing to the persistent drizzle.

 

The first room that Radomus showed us inside the castle was wide and dark. It had no windows, and only two small lamps on top of heavy wooden chests of drawers bore a little light in it. Still, they were sufficient to reveal an equally unexpected decoration: the floor was a tiling made with black and white squares, laid out exactly like a chessboard. There was an old PC in a corner with a rather small healing machine, an intriguing contrast with the dated air of the room.

 

The heavy doors of the castle shut with a pervasive bang, and I started.

 

“Did I scare you off?” Radomus asked, his voice filled with a concern that didn’t reach his amused face, turning from a button on his furniture towards us. “Please, be at ease. You are safe in this place. You can put down this burdensome bag of yours, at least for now.” he added.

 

I didn't obey him: I got my bag off my back, which was a blissful relief, but I kept carrying it by hand. He didn't seem to mind, leading us instead in a wider room with a taller ceiling, still with little daylight but brightly lit nonetheless, because of the presence of half a dozen lamps and of a large glassy chandelier.

 

Its basic decoration was the same: the furniture looked old, but had the associated elegance. It didn't look like it was falling into ruin, but instead as if someone had lived with it and taken care of it. The most obvious similarity with the entrance hall was the chessboard pattern on the tiling on the floor. But the most prominent feature was a narrow mezzanine overhanging the back of the room, where I could see a few bookshelves and a couple of tables of average height.

 

The only other occupant of the room was a girl bent over a wooden table in the relative shade underneath the small balcony, slightly to our left. She wasn’t paying attention to the vase filled with colorful flowers that was right in front of her, but was focusing instead on a half-emptied chessboard. Nonetheless, she straightened up and went towards us as soon as we entered the room.

 

“Welcome, challengers.” she said softly. “Master.” she bowed slightly.

 

She was in her late teenage years, but her clothing was in accordance with the room, or perhaps the etiquette of a hundred years ago, rather than anything that could be expected from a teenage girl. She was clad in black and white, with a white short-sleeved top, a wide black skirt, long tights with black and white stripes and long white gloves. She had a black ribbon in her blonde shoulder-length hair.

 

“Please let me know if there is anything I can do to make your stay more pleasant.” she added.

 

“Come now, Luna.” Radomus chided her gently. Luna? “No need to be so formal. Luna,” he was talking to us again, “is my daughter.”

 

But Luna was El's daughter, right? How come she ended up claiming herself as someone else's daughter?

 

Worse, she hadn't claimed to be Radomus's daughter. He had called her daughter, she had called him master.

 

“The Arena is this way,” Radomus indicated, pointing to a door in the back of the room, behind the table with the chessboard, underneath the mezzanine, “but I am afraid that it is not quite ready yet. Shall I show you the gardens instead?”

 

“We've just seen them.” Cain pointed out. “And personally, I'm a lot more interested in your towers.”

 

“Ah,” Radomus chuckled. “Most of this castle, I am afraid, is unhabitable. The towers, if I may say so, are just for the show.”

 

“That just makes it better!” Cain insisted, slightly snarkily. “A damp, dark dungeon, a flavor of danger, a little hint of transgression... I think a lot of people would be very interested.”

 

I wasn't sure what he meant by that. Personally, even in spite of the rain, a little walk in the gardens would be fine. Or a game of chess, maybe, if the decoration had a purpose.

 

“Poor dungeons. Even after centuries of war, they wouldn't be able to enjoy peace.” Radomus answered, his voice deadpan, but with the same amused expression. “Gabriel?”

"Is the decor chess-themed?" I asked.

“Indeed it is.” Radomus said approvingly. “I enjoy this game a lot, and I even made it my career once.”

“You're a professional player?” I went on, surprised.

“I used to be one, but I retired.” he answered simply.

“Master,” Luna interrupted, frowning, “do you know where Miss Gardevoir is?”

 

“She was outside,” Radomus answered. “I assumed that she was going to watch our guests find their way into the maze, and then start calling for the Gym Trainers to come.”

“Then they would be in the dungeons, if they had any taste.” Cain observed.

 

What?

 

“Did you say something?” Radomus raised his eyebrows at Cain, with the same smile on his face. “Anyhow, I doubt that there is much to worry about. Shall we go outside until she comes back?”

 

Cain and Luna followed the former professional chess player without question. I stayed behind for a bit, glancing at the chessboard. It looked like the ideal set-up for a smothered mate. I didn't know why that one was still known, apart from the curiosity value. Did anyone, I wondered idly, actually manage to get checkmated this way?  

 

But Radomus, Cain and Luna had been waiting in the entrance hall. Luna and Radomus had overcoats assorted to their clothing styles on, and Radomus carried an umbrella instead of his Pokeball-adorned cane. But his attention was fixated on an envelope that he held in his free hand.

 

“Well,” he finally said, glancing at the letter. “It looks like we are playing Black in this game. But it is one that we can win easily enough.”

“What does that mean?” Cain asked, curious.

 

I wasn't as relaxed, because I had caught the chess reference. If we were playing Black, it meant that someone else was playing White. In other words, a hostile party had made a move and Gossip Gardevoir had fallen victim.

 

And I was in the crossfire, of course.

How familiar.

 

“Master,” Luna insisted, her tone a little more emotional than when she was addressing us – it had been sincere, but more controlled, certainly more dutiful. “What does this letter say?”

 

Radomus took a theatrical pose and started reading aloud.

 

“To one Mister Radomus Vanhanen,” he started, his tone exaggeratedly sinister. “I have captured your precious ‘Gossip Gardevoir’. Should you wish to see her again, you will return my daughter to me immediately. El.”

 

“That person is not my father!” Luna protested instantly, a real anguish in her voice.

 

I was completely dumbfounded at this turn of events. El, the earnest priest I had met, would go to such heinous lengths to reclaim his daughter? Luna's reaction was also puzzling: why would she reject so instinctively the idea of El being her father? The priest certainly did not look deluded or depraved, but I was worth little as a judge on such matters.

 

Yet, if I put myself in his shoes, El's actions were somewhat comprehensible. If he truly believed that Radomus had willingly taken his daughter away from her – it was certainly an odd relationship that Luna and him had – then to what lengths would he not go to rescue her?

 

In idea, I found this action justified. If nothing or nobody else was helping him save his daughter from danger – or so he believed, perhaps not without reason – how could he stop at mundane actions, simply asking politely? But, facing the very fact, the sheer brutality of his avowed action, the finality of this ultimatum, the involvement of a Pokemon whose only link to the drama was that she was Radomus's, I was uneasy. Surely there had to be a better reason to resolve this, no?

 

But maybe there wasn't. In this place where there could be an all-powerful Team Meteor of all organizations, it was quite plausible that he had no choice other than take justice in his own hands, in a situation where only success mattered. So how could he decide to stop? 

 

And if we framed the situation symmetrically... suppose that we could kidnap Taka to try and force Solaris and his Team Meteor to stand down. It could work, or not. But was it really proper or moral to refrain from doing this solely on principle, in effect trading Taka and Solaris's well-being for all the lives their actions would keep on harming?

 

“We're not going to let him get away with this, are we?” Cain interjected, at all of us.

 

I wasn't sure. Something in the situation wasn't right, but I didn't know. Anything could have been wrong.

 

“I agree.” Radomus said pointedly. “This letter bore no politeness formulae, not even a ‘Sincerely yours’. This is utterly unacceptable,” he went on, his tone more and more grandiose. “And I shall retaliate in the most damaging fashion against this sorry individual.”

 

He theatrically threw back his umbrella in the umbrella stand, took off his overcoat and started folding it.

 

“What are you doing?” Cain asked indignantly.

 

I was disoriented too. Radomus's statement hadn't been entirely straightforward – he was definitely mocking something, even if I wasn't quite sure what – but it still seemed to imply that he had to step out of the castle.

 

“I am acting in the most damaging fashion for this opponent and the most helpful way for Gardevoir.” Radomus answered, smiling but in a serious voice, walking towards the other room.

“You're not doing anything!” Cain pointed out.

“Precisely.” Radomus approved earnestly, sitting comfortably in an armchair. “I do not need to. If the White king puts himself in check, why would Black need to do anything?” he elaborated.

“It's against the rules,” I objected, half-seriously.

“This might be taking the metaphor too far.” Radomus answered, the contrast between his visible amusement and his serious voice eerie. “This is not a game. We can only stop until the other king is neutralized and his army disbanded. Which is exactly why I need not do anything.”

“That doesn't make any sense.” Cain observed. “She's your Pokemon, you can't just do nothing and hope it works out.”

“And yet, this is how it could precisely happen.” Radomus replied confidently.

“Master, Miss Gardevoir is my dear friend.” Luna protested pleadingly. “I cannot give her up, nor rest until the situation resolves itself, as you believe it will. Please forgive me for my lack of confidence in your abilities... and please allow me to rescue her.”

 

This was brave, I thought. But a stupid course of action on her part. Especially since El had plainly stated that it was Luna he wanted.

 

“I'll help you! But you're not going to exchange yourself for her, are you?” Cain offered, his enthusiasm marred with concern.

“She's my friend. As little as I may like him, if I can only save Miss Gardevoir by putting myself into this man's care, I will.” Luna's tone was matter-of-fact, but sincere and level. Already she was already headed for the door.

“You will do no such thing, Luna.” Radomus got up. He was not joking any more – he was speaking in an authoritative tone with an earnest face, which sounded a lot more normal. “You are the piece that the enemy wants to capture. If you cannot rest until a rescue party has set out to reclaim Gardevoir, then I will look for her in your stead. You know where to stay in the meantime, I am sure?”

 

Luna froze, and looked at her “master”. Which still was a very peculiar relationship.

 

“Thank you, Master.” she bowed a little. “I will thus remain in the safety of the castle and hope for your success.”

"Excellent." Radomus concluded. "Cain, I assume that you will be coming with me. Gabriel, are you interested?"

“Of course I'm coming.” Cain replied. “I'm not letting anyone get away with Pokemon kidnapping! But that's quite the change of heart you had.”

“I told you,” Radomus explained again, but this time without a trace of amusement in her face, “that there was no need to do anything this rash. Gardevoir will make her own way back eventually. I am setting out to pre-empt her escape only because Luna asked me to do so. But you, Gabriel,” he turned to me, “will you be joining us?”

 

I didn't know. There was something unusual in Luna and Radomus's relationship, but how could I know whether it was detrimental to Luna? She had seemed content enough, but couldn't her consent and compliance have been forced out of her? Could it simply be that El had been delusional and I had failed to see it?

 

And if not, could I deny a father his daughter, even if he committed so unbecoming an action to get her back? Did I even have the right to pass judgement on him, I who had left my own family at the other end of the world to barely avoid getting killed in increasingly adverse odds, I who hadn't known the despair of having my family lured out my life?

 

And after all, what interest did I have to get mixed up in this affair? This needn't involve me at all.

 

“Come on, Gabriel, you're not going to let him get away with this!” Cain insisted.

 

I don't know, I wanted to answer.

 

“You wouldn't know any more if you did not join us,” Radomus pointed out. “Perhaps you will be best able to persuade El to see reason.”

 

Explain to a father why he had to renounce his child? I couldn't do that. Unless there was a very good reason. Even then, it required that person to be unbelievably broad-minded, and, above all, reasonable against the outraged call of his blood.

 

“Gossip Gardevoir would be outraged that you did not come rescue her.” Radomus pointed out, completely deadpan. “That would strongly dissuade her from taking mercy on you. She would really insist on that interview.”

 

Oh, come on. That was just ridiculous enough to be serious.

 

“Or work out a compromise, something which you alone in our group could hope to do.” Radomus added.

 

These were fine reasons, but it didn't mean that this was, or had to be, any of my business anyway. And, a compromise? If Luna didn’t want him in her life, whatever her reasons were, and if he did, what room was there for negociation?

 

“Gabriel,” Luna turned to me, distressed. “Please don't let Miss Gardevoir to that man's mercy.”

 

I realized with a slow, sinking feeling that I wasn't going to be able to say no. Mostly for decency's sake – after all, however founded El's complaint was, Gossip Gardevoir was innocent in the matter. Cain was too, and he was putting himself at a significant risk, one that he didn’t deserve. Considering what I had been willing to do to defend innocence so far – that is, nothing – perhaps that was a way to do some good. At last.

 

“I'll be coming.” I said slowly.

 

It was a curious feeling to utter these words – and mean them – while knowing it was wrong. Knowing it would lead to trouble, possibly of the violent kind – if El’s actions were any indication. Wait – where was Radomus? How could I have not paid attention to him?

 

“Great!” Cain reacted. “But where has Radomus gone?”

“Thank you, Gabriel.” Luna solemnly said. “As for Master, I suspect that he has decided to change.”

 

To change?

 

“Master strongly believes in choosing the right hat for the right job.” Luna explained. “And this issue does not mandate a red suit with a red top-hat, but rather –”

 

The door to the Gym opened, and a new figure showed up. Not quite new – the face was almost the same, but it looked paler, with perhaps slightly more hollow cheeks. Radomus had changed clothes too: he was now wearing comfortable-looking trousers, a knee-length dark blue woolen trench coat with a light blue scarf, and a grey hat with two fronts and a black ribbon on top.

 

It was unsettling. How had he changed so fast? And why that ridiculous outfit?

 

“Come this way.” he said, gesturing towards the dark Gym. “We do not have so much time.”

     

Character rates:

Spoiler

Cain: 8/10 (+1). He really is a great person. Not always very sensible, sure, and annoying at times, but still great. 

Luna: 7/10. Hard to say. But her feeling and resolve to rescue Gossip Gardevoir at her own cost were sincere, and commendable. 

Radomus: 5/10. He's pretty weird. And there is this whole master/daughter situation with Luna which is visibly of his doing... But still, a good chess player, so how could I rate him lower than that?

Gossip Gardevoir: 2/10. No change. Still creeping me out. 

El: 7-/10 (-1). His latest move is still very unsettling... 

 

[Aphelli]

Some day my muse will come

Some day we'll meet again...

 

But in the meantime I have a buffer for that kind of situation. Except that of course, this chapter may be terrible -- all the chapters from that arc might. You tell me.  

 

I certainly need to apologize to Adrienn (and perhaps not them only) for every one of the injustices thrown at them. The most blatant one will be repaired in the following chapter. 

 

 

Chapter 65: Temple Knights

 

 

Spoiler

I went last in the desert Gym and Luna shut the door after me, plunging the room into shadows. The only source of light was a yellow ray from the other room through the slit under the door. It was barely sufficient to let me make out a tiling of alternating colors, suggesting that the chess pattern remained there.

 

Following Radomus, Cain and I were walking close to the walls, but my eyes kept darting towards the center of the room, where massive shadows suggested large obstacles and the tiles themselves seemed to be wider.

 

Was it a human-scale chessboard?

 

After taking a corner and walking perhaps a dozen meters in utter silence, Radomus froze. There was the faint sound of a key unlocking something, and suddenly a passage was open on our left.

 

“Come on, quickly.” Radomus urged us on.

 

We went down some stairs, Radomus bringing up the rear, and found ourselves in a long dark corridor. My bag was regularly scraping either one of the walls. When Radomus turned the lights on, we found out that we were indeed in a narrow stone corridor about two meters high, lit by regularly laid out electric lamps.

 

“What is this place?” Cain asked while walking on.

“It’s the staff entrance to the Gym.” Radomus explained from behind us. “The Trainers tend to get bored of walking through the plant maze each time. It’s much faster.”

“But isn’t that creep going to go this exact way to find Luna?” Cain pointed out, very sensibly. “If it’s the Gym Trainers’ entrance, people already know about it.”

“You can rest assured that El is not going to try.” Radomus replied confidently.

 

What could that mean? Either that El didn’t know about the passage, or that he knew about it and wasn’t about to try. But if he was willing to kidnap so notorious a Pokemon as Gossip Gardevoir to reach his aims, why wouldn’t he?

 

It could only be because he would suspect some sort of trap. Which, in turn, suggested that Radomus was known to act underhandedly and resort to such ploys.

 

Which even his current attitude suggested. Hadn’t he exactly stated that doing nothing was the worst damage he could deal to his opponent?

 

The passage wasn’t perfectly regular, and at times the corridor grew narrower, forcing me to take my bag off my back and carry it by hand – or drag it. Such changes of station on my part, which took each time a couple of seconds, seemed to get on Cain’s nerves, as he was much less weighed down.

 

Soon, Radomus insisted to get ahead of us, because, he explained, the passage was coming to its end and he had to unlock it, and we managed to let him pass after a few contortions, leading to Cain making a typical comment alluding to the certain activities that seemed to be the main focus of his humor. Neither I nor, thankfully, Radomus acknowledged it.

 

“Damn, that burn hurt.” he whispered as Radomus sped on ahead and himself resumed his walk.

 

I prefer when you sing, I wanted to answer.

 

“By the way, Gabriel,” he added, “why didn’t you want to go find Gardevoir? It’s not about how she teased you, is it?”

“No!” I protested, surprised at the suggestion, but realizing in a disturbing heartbeat that it was a conceivable motive. “But… I didn’t want to get involved in this. I keep thinking something is weird, and I’m not sure what to do.”

“Come on,” Cain exclaimed, incredulous. “This El kidnapped Radomus’s Pokemon to force him to hand over Luna. But she’s her own person. I don’t care if he’s her father or not, you heard like me that she didn’t want anything to do with him. That’s good enough for me.”

 

I stopped, fascinated by Cain’s reply. It was so obvious, and yet I had not even considered that outlook. Instead, as El had acted and Radomus had stated – perhaps metaphorically, perhaps not – I had never considered Luna a party of the confrontation. The concept of family had been enough to short-circuit my brain.

 

While of course, Cain would reject the very idea because of his own experience. He would stand for Luna’s choices and back them.

 

“That’s a very good point.” I acknowledged.

 

But I had met the aging priest, and he had sounded level-headed enough. And youth was a time of rash decisions, so his story about Luna – even if she denied him – could well be true. Not to mention that she had ended up with a man whom she unironically called ‘master’, while he called her his daughter.

 

Yet Luna’s claim certainly couldn’t be dismissed out of hand, and Cain was the best remainder of that. And indeed, I mused, I might have believed her a lot more had I met her before the priest.

 

There was something most peculiar in this situation, and it made me especially uneasy. This business couldn’t end well, and I was already starting to regret my decision of getting involved. Still, if it helped Cain get away scot-free, perhaps it would be worth it?

 

The end of the passage came in sight, after especially narrow stairs leading to a stone-colored door dug directly in the thick walls running in a large imperfect circle of at least a kilometer in radius around the castle. Radomus was waiting for us outside as we emerged from the underground passage, then carefully locked the door with a complicated key, and urged us to go on.

 

“So it’s all good,” Cain frowned at Radomus, “but where are we going anyway?”

“The Reborn Grand Gates.” Radomus answered distinctly. “Obviously.”

 

Obviously. Right.

 

“How exactly did you know about that?” Cain asked, rightfully suspicious.

“Easily enough. This El wants to find us, and Agate City will be too populous for his purposes. The wilderness is too big and too empty. But the Grand Gates are an unmistakable landmark, and usually pretty deserted from the outside. Plus, it was written in the letter.”

“Was it? I don’t remember you reading it.” Cain replied, echoing my thoughts.

“There was no point. I was hoping to convince you not to do anything.”

 

And yet, I thought, he had been trying to convince me not to stay in the castle…

 

This enigma was starting to get pointlessly complicated. Why had I let Luna talk me into participating in the rescue?

 

“This makes no sense.” Cain said, displaying as usual this day some excellent insight.

“Then let’s look for it.” Radomus concluded, deadpan.

“We’re not going to walk to the Grand Gates, right?” Cain asked on, very practically.

“Of course no. Although you might have preferred so.”

 

We followed Radomus’s lead, walking down the hill westwards, until he made us duck under the wired fence circling a meadow with at least twenty Tauros peacefully eating the grass. He asked us to wait for him a little, then went talking to the farmer.

 

Soon, the farmer took three Tauros from the stock and led them with Radomus, towards the other end of the fence, on the western side of the meadow. Cain and I shared a nervous glance.

 

“What is he doing?” Cain muttered.

“He’s finding a faster way through the Route,” I replied uneasily.

 

Radomus beckoned to us.

 

“So,” he explained – and I noticed with growing apprehension that the three Tauros already looked rather worked up. “Tauros riding 101. Hang on to your beasts and follow me. It’s going to be alright.”

 

He helped the uneasy Cain mount the bull Pokemon meant for him. The Tauros rushed forward, to the trembling teenager’s dismay.

 

I probably looked even less confident as Radomus helped me, and my Tauros reacted in the same way by rushing forward, and all I could do was hang on and not let go.

 

I didn’t see it, but Radomus probably mounted his own Tauros like a Tolkien elf, and it went on at the exact pace its rider wanted, which was somehow fast enough to overtake us, while the Gym Leader seemed completely nonplussed at the unstability of his station.

 

It was terrifying and painful. The Tauros was going on at a scarily fast run, and its back’s regular motion was shaking me up and down so hard that I feared at every step to be unseated, while dreading the consequences of doing so, certainly akin to falling off a moving car. It was all I could do to hang on as hard as I could, which seemed to enrage the poor Pokemon even more.

 

I didn’t shout, preferring to focus on my breathing and my hold (which my heavy bag certainly didn’t help with) instead, and suppressing how much (and how literal of) a pain in the backside this transportation method was. However uncomfortable, it was still effective. The Tauros was running tirelessly much faster than we could, and this, obliviously to the irregular ground it was treading on. In particular, it didn’t mind rushing through the tall grass, a new source of pain that I had to adjust for, lest I fell off – and I didn’t want that.

 

The closest I came to being unseated came when, following Radomus’s still impassive lead, it turned brutally left as the Lapis Ward of Reborn City came into sight, down the cliff marking the western end of Route 1. I felt myself flung towards the outside of the Tauros's rough corner, and I only managed to hang on by burying my fingers in the bull Pokemon's body, doubtlessly infuriating it further.

 

Our Tauros themselves shook Cain and me off at the end of this mostly natural roller-coaster, seconds after Radomus dismounted with so supreme a confidence that it looked careless.

 

“I wasn’t ready for this ride…” I complained sotto voce to Cain as I was still a bit dizzy.

“Want some more practice?” he answered mischievously.

 

Uh...

 

“You know I’m only joking, right?” Cain added, all play gone from his voice. “You don’t have to take this so seriously.”

 

I didn’t answer, preferring to follow Radomus downhill, in the direction of the Reborn City walls that we could see in the distance. As he had asserted earlier, the area was deserted and mostly rocky, a rugged terrain with only sparse patches of grass in the wet earth.

 

It was only a little walk, helpful enough for us to regain enough composure, until we reached the foot of the Reborn City walls, just near the other side of the Gates.

 

“Why are they closed, by the way?” I frowned.

“They’ve been stuck like for something like a decade.” Cain answered. “At least from what I heard.”

“Indeed,” Radomus completed. “Their breakdown was the first one of the recent unfortunes that plagued Reborn City. The earthquakes happened only a couple of months afterwards.”

“Anyway, El’s not there.” Cain noticed. “You’re sure he was supposed to be there?”

 

Or perhaps we were in advance?

And how did we even know that it was what the letter said?

 

Radomus produced the letter from a pocket of his jacket, and started emphatically reading.

 

“I have captured your precious 'Gossip Gardevoir'. Should you wish to see her again, you will return my daughter to me immediately.” Radomus enunciated clearly, matching what we had heard earlier. Then he pocketed the letter again, and added: “there’s supposed to be a little cave somewhere in the walls. Do you two mind looking for it?”

 

Hum…

 

“How do you know about that?” Cain replied, frowning.

“Isn’t it clear?” the professional chess player replied mildly. “Why, I am sure that your partner in crime has already figured it out. Even if he’s not very vocal about it.”

 

Partner in crime?

 

“Gabriel, what do you think about this?” Cain asked me.

 

I really didn’t like being put on the spot like that, especially regarding a situation where I was completely lost and in which I really shouldn’t have got involved in the first place. Radomus had acted quite strangely so far, and I was certainly hesitant to peg him as an ally even in this matter.

 

Which meant that I had to sound as unthreatening as possible, and mostly compliant.

 

“I’m not sure,” I tried out, shrugging and trying to look unconcerned, “but it could be in the letter. After all, this El wants us to find him, no?”

“Obviously.” Radomus confirmed curtly. “Now, shall we look for that gap?”

 

Cain found the narrow opening almost immediately, very close to the large Gates, and slipped through it first, followed by Radomus and I went last, with some effort to pull my bag through it.

 

All of a sudden, the light had almost disappeared, and it took me a few seconds to get accustomed to the relative darkness. But once that instant was over, the sight was remarkable: the walls had been carefully emptied out, and their inside looked like a tunnel of sorts. Not unlike, actually, the tunnel starting in Radomus’s own battlements.

 

Cain was focusing on what was at the edge of the tunnel. Namely, a large, circular, gaping hole in the ground with a rope ladder tied to the wall.

 

My heartbeat raced as I registered this last element. I remembered the last time I had taken a tope ladder. It had been a trap, and one I would not have survived, had Solaris willed so, or had Victoria not shown up in time.

 

Just thinking of the Meteor leader, of the circumstances of our first meeting, when I had been his underground prisoner – made me shiver.

 

But Cain didn’t seem to have the same reservations as I had. He hadn’t been exactly cautious before, but he had decided to reach another new level of recklessness: namely, he was already starting to climb down the ladder.

 

“It’s a trap, Cain.” I hissed. “We can’t go this way!”

“Well, how else are we going to rescue Gardevoir?” he replied.

“How…” I stuttered, bewildered at the absurd levels of sheer recklessness behind this assertion, “how can we hope to rescue her if we fell in a trap on the way?”

“It can’t be too bad a trap,” Radomus supplied. “Because this El wants Luna to come here, and wouldn’t want her harmed.”

“That leaves quite many ways for a trap to be set and sprung.” I answered, unconvinced.

“We’re not going to stay up here all day arguing!” Cain exclaimed. “Gardevoir is down here, right? That means we’ve got to go down to save her.”

“True.” Radomus approved him, for some unearthly reason. How could they both be so deluded? “Please lead the way.”

 

So Cain started climbing down the ladder, promising to call us out when he got down. It looked like he was contorting a little to get past a choke point, but he reached the bottom soon enough.

 

“It’s great down there!” he yelled at us. “No traps of any kind. There’s a single path to follow.”

“There.” Radomus pointed out. “Satisfied?”

 

No, I wasn’t. This was madness. We were going deep underground, after someone who was unhinged enough to deliver the ultimatum ‘Luna against Gardevoir’. All we were doing was following the word of an abrupt so-called chessmaster who kept his intelligence very close to his chest!

 

There was no way this could end well!

 

“Fine.” Radomus said, handing me a carefully folded sheet of paper that he had pulled from a jacket pocket. “Here’s El’s letter.”

I have captured your precious 'Gossip Gardevoir', I read. Should you wish to see her again, you will return my daughter to me. I will be waiting for her in the ancient Citae Arc-Astrae. You will find a shaft in the walls of the city near the Reborn Grand Gates, and you can follow the tunnel below to the Aerie. Do not make me wait.

 

It probably meant something that, after this read, my first thought was: how did I know he wasn’t showing a fake letter?

 

But, just in case something went truly wrong, did it make sense for Radomus to betray us now? Probably not, I decided. Neither Cain nor I had anything that he could want.

 

There was the Ruby Ring, of course. Gardevoir might knew I had got it. And that could explain why Radomus had insisted so much for me to come. But there were far simpler settings to make me hand the Ring over, wasn’t there?

 

In other words, it was probably safest to pretend to trust Radomus enough to follow this demented course. Moreover, leaving now Cain to the mercy of whatever deception lurked below was beyond despicable.

 

“Fine.” I grunted.

 

I eyed the ladder, and the first chokepoint.

 

Especially so soon after the memorable Tauros ride, the climb down was difficult. It didn’t help that I had already been weary this morning and that the ladder seemed to be plotting to move at the very times when my balance was the most precarious. My large backpack was making the chokepoints particularly tricky, and I had to make my way through them by brute force, hoping that the bag wasn’t going to be ripped open.

 

The landing provided me with another nasty surprise that made my heart beat faster, my breathing speed up, and my eyes dart around, expecting an attack any second. The cave we were in was familiar: it was the same eerie, faint lighting that seemed to come from minute fissures, producing the same glint of colorful crystals embedded in the rock all around us, as the place where I first met Solaris – and could have died there, without Victoria.

 

And look how I repaid her.

 

“You took your time.” Cain quipped, amused.

“You rushed without thinking!” I replied.

“I was just kidding, calm down. It’s pretty down there, don’t you think?”

“I feel like I’m burying myself.” I shivered. “I don’t like this place.”

 

I fumbled in my bag until I found the headlights and the bigger flashlight, which were both still working.

 

“Take this.” I gave Cain a headlight. “We’re going to need it.”

 

If only to announce our presence, a very worried part of me darkly completed the sentence.

 

The crystals reflected the artificial light, shone in bright hues of green, red and purple as the lamps swept over them, giving a new life to the buried rock walls, and this stirred the faintest bits of memories of a geology class, so many eternities ago and half the world across.

 

But I didn’t dwell on this, as Radomus completed his effortless-looking descent and ordered us, against all common sense, to go on. Cain started walking forward, in the only unobstructed direction, and I was forced to follow him, not without pointing out another safety concern.

 

“Are we going to leave the ladder like that?”

“There’s no way to access it other than the path we are currently taking.” Radomus pointed out. “The risk is negligible.”

“What if there’s no one down there? What if the goal was only to draw us into the abyss, take back the ladder and let us die?”

 

Buried alive…

 

“That’s not going to happen.” he replied authoritatively. “One, in this matter, the less involved we are, the more effective. Two, El knows that trying to kill me won’t get him Luna. Three, it’ll be easier with the ladder, but I can assure you that we can get out without it.”

 

And in spite of my own judgement, my legs found themselves automatically agreeing and following the motion instead of starting their escape in a panic. I knew something wasn’t right, and I was letting myself get lulled into complacency by someone who I knew was withholding important information! For instance, why was it – how could it be – so useful to do nothing?

 

But all I could bring myself to do was follow the purple-haired teenager in front of me, with the thinking, however necessary, reduced to a background task unable to impact my physical motions. And resolve, in the comfort of the current peace, to look out for my safety first rather than the objective. And Cain’s, of course.

 

The narrow, winding tunnel slowly led us deeper underground, which only served to bolster my anxiety. It was also often interrupted by piles of loose stones of varying heights, all of them a testimony to the insane – and allegedly pointless – danger lying in the course we were choosing. Yet none of the others seemed to care, and there was little point in voicing a concern that Cain wouldn’t consider and Radomus would shoot down.

 

There was another hole in the ground at the end of the passage, which led us to another gallery, this one with walls so smooth and a floor so regular that they could only be man-made.

 

“Ah, Gardevoir!” I heard Cain say, arriving first in what looked like a wider space, clearly relieved. “And, uh… you’re not El, are you?”

 

 

I hurried, and Radomus behind me, to catch up with Cain. We ended up in a small square room. Its lighting was still dim, but it was comforting to see the wooden torches regularly laid out on the walls and the dance of the faint shadows that the fire produced. The room was built with carefully carved stone with crystals encrusted here and there, their reflects glimmering under the light.

 

Gossip Gardevoir was standing near another… woman, probably. She was pale-skinned, her untarnished white jacket was almost like a thin lab coat, and her blue top showed a lot of skin at waist size. She was wearing dark grey slacks and black shoes.

 

It was true, certainly, although I wouldn’t have realized without looking at this person’s clothes, that it was significantly warmer here than outside. Not enough to make me wish I hadn’t brought my coat, but still.

 

“No,” the unknown woman shook her head. “You mean the older man who just arrived here, I suppose?”

 

Cain turned to Radomus questioningly.

 

“It could well be him.” the Psychic Leader answered.

 

The woman turned to him, and she looked more alert somehow, perhaps tenser.

 

“And you must be Radomus, then,” she winced.

“How would you know that?”

“Well, this older man, El as you call him, found me here a short while ago,” she answered, annoyed. “He warned me that you were after him and told me why.”

“What did he tell you?” Radomus asked with a detached tone.

 

I noted that, uncharacteristically enough, the Gossip Gardevoir was standing close to the other woman, silent and trembling.

 

“He told me how you had kidnapped his daughter,” the woman explained, with outrage in her voice, “and brainwashed her into thinking she was your own!”

 

And here we went again. El’s accusation was made more specific, and the act he was accusing Radomus of committing was far more monstrous. It didn’t match what he had told me, true, but who would accuse someone else of doing so contemptible an action in front of a stranger?

 

“And then when he got ahold of your Gardevoir to force you to give him Luna back,” – something which was still leagues less serious than a brainwashing accusation, I decided – “she told him about all the awful things you had done to her. It’s inconceivable that such a lovely Pokemon as her could be attracted to such a person as you.”

“Is that so?” Radomus asked, clearly amused at our quizzical stares, something which felt somehow at odds with his looks.

“But she was always looking so happy…” Cain muttered, incredulous.

“It was all a show!” Gardevoir spoke, her voice no longer cheerful and confident but rather tearful and hesitant. She was trembling. “I’m expected to be in perfect harmony with my Trainer, as Gossip Gardevoir! And you haven’t seen him when he’s angry with me…”, she added, distressed.

“Don’t worry, Gardevoir,” the woman spoke soothingly. “I’m going to protect you. It’s over now. You’re safe.”

“Thank you, Adrienn,” the effort that Gardevoir was making to repress her sobs was audible. “Thank you. I’m glad that El finally freed me from him, and that you’ll defend me.”

“I’m not going to stand for anyone who mistreats their Pokemon like that.” Adrienn replied in a nearly martial tone. “You can count on me, Gardevoir.”

 

Black and white morality, I noted, rather dreamily. It was rather befitting Cain, but Adrienn was quite a few years older.

 

“And you? You have a problem with that?” Adrienn turned to me, more belligerently.

 

It took me a couple of seconds to come down to earth and realize that, once again, I had messed up. All I had to do was to be a dispassionate spectator, and, incidentally, make sure that Cain didn’t end up in further trouble that he certainly hadn’t deserved. That meant avoiding confrontation – especially such a pointless one – at all costs.

 

Well, most of them. “For light is precious to me, but not enough to pay for it with my sight.”

 

I scoffed. Poetry, now of all times.

 

“No.” I replied, my voice instantly soft and almost stuttering. “That’s justified, of course.”

“Good,” the answer was harsh.

“We had business to conduct with El.” Radomus brought us back on topic. “Where is he?”

“This way.” Adrienn pointed towards a side of the room, leading to another corridor. “But don’t bother following him if you don’t intend to give Luna back.”

 

Adrienn left first with Gardevoir, leaving all three of us alone in the room.

 

Radomus looked undisturbed by the accusations levelled at him. Cain looked more thoughtful.

 

“I would have never thought Gardevoir felt this way…” he said, not even expecting a comment.

 

Neither had I, certainly. The Gossip Gardevoir I had met was always extremely lively, and if she was under someone’s ascendancy in such a harmful way, it hadn’t showed… And the way she referred to herself as freed…

 

“But,” Cain turned to Radomus, “did you really brainwash Luna?”

“That’s ridiculous. How would I ever do such a thing?” Radomus answered matter-of-factly. “Isn’t all of this blatantly obvious?”

“You’re dodging the question.” I commented. “If you already know what’s happening, why not say it?”

“Would you believe me if I did?” he replied.

“Perhaps not.” I conceded after a second. “But I would trust you more.”

“Or you might not.” he pointed out, humorously but no less truthfully – should El’s accusations prove founded.

“Hey, stop it with the nonsense.” Cain chimed in. “I’m going after El.”

 

But perhaps it made more sense to stay here. If El was ahead, he likely wouldn’t act against us from afar. Moreover, Radomus was still standing here, knowing the answers already, although I didn’t feel he would be easy to talk into spilling the beans.

 

But since I was there, for my and Cain’s safety if anything else, it would be important to figure out what was actually going on.

 

I notice that I am confused.

But now what?

 

[Evi Crystal]

15 hours ago, Mindlack said:

No, I wasn’t. This was madness. We were going deep underground, after someone who was unhinged enough to deliver the ultimatum ‘Luna against Gardevoir’. All we were doing was following the word of an abrupt so-called chessmaster who kept his intelligence very close to his chest!

 

There was no way this could end well!

Yikes... Can someone just listen to this poor guy already. I feel bad for Gabriel *hugs him*

 

It was a nice chapter overall, expect for the constant back and worth trust. How is he sane after this and the whole Pyros business? I can feel his sanity sinking with every chapter

[Aphelli]

On 3/15/2022 at 2:08 PM, Evi Crystal said:

Yikes... Can someone just listen to this poor guy already. I feel bad for Gabriel *hugs him*

 

One side of the issue is that Gabriel has decided (long ago, before the beginning of the story) that there was no point in talking to an audience who didn't listen. And now, he doesn't have very many people to talk with, and he doesn't believe any of them will listen.

 

(Also, while he appreciates the intention, Gabriel isn't very comfortable hugging.)

 

On 3/15/2022 at 2:08 PM, Evi Crystal said:

It was a nice chapter overall, expect for the constant back and worth trust. How is he sane after this and the whole Pyros business? I can feel his sanity sinking with every chapter

 

Maybe I went overboard with how Gabriel keeps bringing up the issue. But I feel that it's an important part of the way he experiences these events -- the hopeless confusion at what is going on, the permanent indecisiveness on what to do, whom to side with, the fear of all hell breaking loose and ending up injured or trapped...

 

Cain doesn't have these existential questions -- he chose a course and sticks to it (for now). It's been quite established that he's going to stand up for what he believes is right, without a care for self-preservation. Adrienn's case is similar -- they've been explained that Radomus (and by extension, his allies) were thoroughly despicable people, and they act very consistently with it. They're not trying to listen to the other side or find a compromise. As far as they are concerned, Radomus is Evil, and the only courtesy they will extend is a surrender offer. Radomus is, obviously, playing his own game somehow. Little wonder none of them would listen.

 

Gabriel's sanity is, well... a work in progress. I'm not telling which direction.

[Aphelli]

My prayers have been answered! My Muse has come, and helped me resume the writing of this magnificent finale for Part 3. It's longer than I expected too, but it has everything you've ever wanted: adventure, action, lies, secrets, shadowy seemingly omnipotent figures, plans within plans, bloody violence, not everyone hating Gabriel... Maybe the last one is too much though, I don't know. 

 

The following is not this chapter. It's just one step further in the very necessary build-up. But it's one with quite a few call-backs. Can you find them all?  

(Again, I have no idea of the quality of the chapters of this arc, so some feedback would be nice). 

 

 

Chapter 66: The Bishop's Gambit

 

 

Spoiler

The room where El was standing, clad in a solemn long white robe, was far larger than the one we had met Adrienn in, and therefore had more torches to light it. It also had a large gaping hole in its center, with an ornate, if old, railing preventing visitors from falling in.

 

Gardevoir was standing near the older priest who was standing still, Adrienn by her side. Next to them was an alcove, at the bottom of which stood a head-sized statue representing the front half of a four-legged, slender creature, engulfed in a disconcertingly dynamic-looking stone vortex.

 

“You will refrain from shouting,” El spoke to Cain with a distant earnestness, “in this holy place. I presume,” he added for Adrienn, “that you weren’t able to persuade them.”

“But for you, Gabriel,” the priest added, “I am pained to see that you chose to align yourself with my enemy. I can but hope that you will see the error of your ways.”

“I’m not aligned with Radomus.” I answered. “Not until I am convinced that he is in the right.”

“Gabriel!” Cain exclaimed, shocked. “You wouldn’t side with him! He kidnapped Gardevoir!”

 

“I was not kidnapped!” Gardevoir protested indignantly, but in her usual style – not at Cain, rather to the universe as a whole that was her audience. “El set me free from this monster’s control. He enlightened me.”

“Gardevoir,” El went further, “these heathens are trapped in their darkness. They are blind, and they cannot see it; they hurt, and they cannot feel it. But fortunately, this is the best place in the world to remedy this defect of their earthly nature.”

 

Oh dear. Religious nonsense.

 

“Hey, we’re right here.” Cain pointed out.

“And look at yourself.” El said with a shockingly overt disgust. “Is this a way to present yourself to the world and to the Lord?”

“Yeah,” Cain shrugged. “You have a problem with it?”

“El, are you done with this charade?” Radomus brought back the subject on topic.

“Charade?” El nearly choked with indignation. “You abduct my daughter… you brainwash her into forgetting about her parentage… and I am making this a charade? My Lord…” he sighed. “I apologize for bringing this filth to Your holy House. But I will need Your strength to cleanse this devilry.”

 

“Cain,” he stared straight at the teenager, “you have a relic in your possession. Please lend it to me.”

“Uh, what are you talking about?” Cain asked, puzzled.

“Gardevoir, please.” El gestured at the Pokemon.

 

Cain gasped and grabbed the chain around his neck. But it was being lifted by telekinesis, revealing a shiny purple stone at its bottom near Cain’s chest, hidden under his clothes. The psychic lift stopped when the pendant was all at the top of Cain’s hand, for it to be removed easily.

 

“What does Anna’s Pendant have to do with anything?” he inquired.

“Please come forward.” El spoke to Cain.

 

Cain complied reluctantly, glancing nervously at the imperturbable Radomus. I didn’t know either how the Pendant was involved in the story, and this sounded ominous.

 

“There is a little space in the statue’s neck where you can embed the Amethyst.” El explained, a reverent inflection on the name of the stone, as Cain walked into the small alcove and looked at the statue.

 

Cain saw the correct spot at once, and the effect of him embedding the gemstone into the statue was immediate. The stone above the statue opened, having been all this time a hidden entrance to a small, circular, dark stairwell.

 

How had he known?

 

El bent slowly and took back the pendant from its place. Nothing moved.

 

“I will need it shortly,” he told Cain. “I hope that you don’t mind. Now, let us proceed.”

“Why?” Cain asked. “What’s down there?”

“It will be explained. I shall lead the way.”

 

Adrienn and Gardevoir walked behind El without a word, leaving all three of us behind, unsure of what to do.

 

“Should we really follow him?” Cain asked, demonstrating that he did, in fact, have sense.

“What do you think?” Radomus answered, as helpful as ever.

“I mean, he still has Gardevoir, right?”

 

Here we went again.

 

“I think your comrade has some objections.” Radomus observed on an amused tone.

“Gabriel?” Cain pursued. “What do you think?”

“I think,” I answered, dropping caution, “that getting involved in this business was a mistake. I don’t like this place and I don’t understand why I have to be a witness in a dispute between him and El.”

“You’d leave Gardevoir in this creep’s hands? I mean, you heard how he called me, right?”

“I don’t see the point of doing Radomus’s work for him.” I elaborated. “He said he could do it his way, better than this, so I don’t see –”

“Boring.” Radomus abruptly cut me off. “I’ll give you a good reason why we should go on. Because El has the Pendant you used to hold and he won’t give it back unless you insist,” he explained, to Cain’s approval and my unease. “Let’s move on.”

 

Cain rushed down the steps, Radomus on his heels, leaving me behind, alone to make my mind. Radomus’s argument made sense, certainly. But if so, why hadn’t he protested on Cain’s behalf when El had pocketed it? Why was he letting El dictate all the rules of the game, all the hoops we had to jump through, to even manage to discuss Gardevoir and Luna?

 

I knew that the most sensible course of action was to bolt out of this ominous place where the situation obeyed no logic I could understand. But I wasn’t going to let Cain alone in this set-up. As far as I knew, the exit was still easily accessible – unless there had been a hidden third party whose goal had been to lock us all in there. So as someone who knew to expect foul play, perhaps I could save Cain and myself from the inevitable ensuing mess.

 

So I went down in the narrow stairwell, lit my flashlight up, and starting walking down the stairs fast enough, hoping against hope that, by implementing the conscious decision to go on, I would silence the screaming protests of my mind against any sign of my presence here.

 

I ended up in another large rectangular room and started feeling intense discomfort, without any apparent physical cause. I had known before that I was in an old, frail construction, but now I could feel in my very bones that I was perhaps fifty meters underground, in a place that shouldn’t have looked so well preserved. Maybe that was how archeologists felt when they explored old tombs believed to be cursed.

 

It’s easy to believe curses don’t exist from thousands of kilometers away. But I felt abnormally cold in this too smooth room, where the decorating statues looked like they were moving along with my flashlight in the corners of my sight.

 

This was not the Angels, I chided myself. They did not exist. It wasn’t life-endangering to blink. All of it was just an impression, because I was tired, anxious and irritated.

 

My facetious mind took advantage of this moment of weakness to reproduce a mischievous, mocking laugh to my ears. A fae, or an elf, chuckling at a puny mortal’s foolhardy defenselessness. It was not helpful.

 

I hurried up towards the rest of the group, who was standing in front of a massive marble gate, inscribed with a pattern bringing up terrifying memories. Four colored crystal scars, encrusted in the door, met at its center: the one pointing top-right was bright red, the one pointing top-left was deep blue, bottom-right was purple, bottom-left was green.

 

El was closest to the gate, with Gardevoir nearby, shining with a cold white glow, which was the only source of light. Adrienn was standing nearby, Cain and Radomus further by a couple of meters. Yet, Gardevoir’s light was lighting the room up far more than it should. It wasn’t the soft light of comfort, but a harsh spotlight shining most of all on defects. Radomus’s garments sharply appeared as shabby, his face worn down and his amused smile an evil smirk. It showed the features of Cain’s face that he had tried to hide with his makeup, fading reminders of what had happened on Apophyll Island, and the inevitable teenage spots. Adrienn looked harder in the light too, her eyes aggressive, her entire stance poised for an impending fight. On the reverse, the old priest looked older and thinner somehow, but more serene than ever, more resolute, and stronger.

 

That light was obviously playing tricks. I should be treating my very sight with suspicion.

 

“At last you have come, Gabriel.” El spoke, more solemn than ever, and his voice seem to resound most peculiarly in the empty room. It felt like the entire space was vibrating in unison with this voice.

“You went last, and yet it is fitting. For it is written: ‘Were your sins a tower to the very sky, the Lord’s mercy is a hundred times greater still; I will redeem the repenting sinner.’”

“Stop beating around the bush!” Cain snapped, sounding so much weaker in this place. “Give us Gardevoir back.”

“Silence!” El shouted, his voice somehow echoing all around the room in a perfectly constructive interference. “And let your hearts and eyes rejoice in the sight that you currently behold.”

“Beyond this door,” he enunciated feverishly, “is that from whose dreams our world unfolds. Behold, o sinners – the birthplace of Arceus himself.”

 

I remembered when Solaris had made a similar speech, likely close to there. I had been skeptical then, because it wasn’t exactly the most unusual of claims, and that these places couldn’t have existed before being created. But now…

 

Even though this logical hole remained, I wasn’t so sure. This place had a definitely overworldly feel. And El’s very presence, the effect of the light felt barely short of supernatural. Cain looked uncertain, too, I believed, although the light could have tricked me.

 

“For a meteor came upon our Earth from outer space, bearing our Lord. In this sanctum doth this holy meteor rest. Alas, it will take more than a single of the keys to restore the Lord’s sacred power, and renew His blessing on our planet. If He was not disgusted in the first place by the treatment we did to His Holy Sanctum.”

“Imagine the infamy!” he thundered. “Reborn City burying its holy ancient legacy and enshrining filth in its place! Replacing beauty with rot, purity with decadence, virtue with book-keeping, sanctity with crack! No, the Lord would not renew the Earth’s blessing. The Holy Judgement that He would bestow on our planet would be frightful, an example of His Wrath for the eons to come!”

“But perhaps,” his voice became a gentler whisper, still oddly penetrating, “perhaps we can reason with Him. Beg Him, as our fathers’ forefathers before us, to forgive the wicked in favor of the just. Ask Him to stay His hand for the honor of His Holiness. Perhaps, if we could use His Power, we could shield Him from our misery, and cleanse ourselves the worst of our impurity.”

 

Something wasn’t right with this entire situation, of course. This place seemed to instill incredible charisma into El, and channel some rather extreme beliefs in return. Whether or not the Lord existed, I was doubtful that mankind’s smiting was coming. It wasn’t as if these few last decades had been the healthiest and safest in recorded world history. Not that our world was perfect – it wasn’t. But whatever Golden Age El could be referring to, it wasn’t – couldn’t be – as good. Not to mention that setting examples was pointless if no one was around to witness them, such as what would happen if, say, mankind were smitten.

 

“I find myself amazed at how much heresy you can harness in this very place, holy as you may claim it is.” Radomus quipped, rather weakly compared to El’s eloquence.

“And how would a person such as you recognize heresy? You’re nothing but a swine without a moral compass.” El retorted acidly, losing his serenity.

“Better no moral compass than one pointing south.” Radomus replied evenly, ringing several alarm bells in my mind.

 

“How can you be so callous?” Adrienn asked Radomus. “You did unspeakable things to this sweet Gardevoir, you kidnapped this man’s daughter and brainwashed her. This has to end, and I’m going to end it now.”

“It might be too hard to ask, but would you try thinking with your brain instead of this parasitic moral compass of which you’re so proud?” Radomus asked Adrienn coldly. “El is the one who acted first in this matter. He kidnapped my Gardevoir to get Luna back, and Luna herself insisted that we should not leave Gardevoir in danger.”

“How long can you keep lying like this?” Gardevoir shouted, indignant. “We all know what you did to poor Luna. I was there; I saw it all! Admit it, for once.”

 

“How would it alleviate your suffering? And why would I even care?”

“She’s your Pokemon!” Cain protested. “You can’t claim her back by being so awful to her!”

“A Pokemon like that? Why should I care?” Radomus’s voice was harder each time.

“Because Luna cares for her! And because she’s your Pokemon, you can’t just… be like that!”

“Radomus,” El summarized, “even your allies cannot stand your very being. I shall be merciful once more, and give you a final chance. Release Luna, and I shall release Gardevoir and let you depart in peace.”

“Assuming she even wants to go back.” Adrienn supplied.

“If we’re speaking of wishes, as Cain and Gabriel will testify, Luna has expressed an adamant one to remain with me.”

 

Which could have been coerced, of course.

 

“When did you start caring for children’s wishes, Mr. Fischer?” El’s tone was venomous, and I felt sure, for a second, that something vicious was hiding in this question.

 

Fischer? Like the chess player? Wasn’t his name Vanhanen?

 

“Will you give back this young man”, Radomus pointed at Cain and bluntly asked El, not trying any more to disdain or elude the inevitable confrontation, “the pendant you took?”

“No. I shall keep it, as a family heirloom!”

“It’s not!” Cain protested. “It’s a relic of Anna’s father!”

“Who’s Anna?” Adrienn asked.

“An orphaned girl.” El explained. “But this gem was stolen from my family a long time ago, and I am its rightful keeper.”

“That’s not true!” Cain protested.

“You know nothing.” El spat. “Neither does this girl. Did she have any inkling that it would open the door above? That it would fit perfectly this gate? Can she tell you of its making, its origin?”

“That’s impossible…” Cain muttered, shaken.

 

“You’re lying!” he decided, shaking his head and walking threateningly towards El. “Give it back.”

“Stop, thief.” Adrienn asserted, showing a Pokeball. “Do not make me use force against you.”

“I’m not a thief!” Cain shouted at Adrienn, taking a Pokeball himself. “You’re taking this back right now.”

“El?” Adrienn managed to ask a lot in a single sentence.

“Do not pursue the poor boy.” El shook his head. “Look at him, look at the time he spent with Radomus – he is confused enough. Do not get angry at the tool, but at the hand that wields it.”

“Is this the time where I start getting rid of you?” Radomus asked, sounding bored. “If so, I think we’re overlooking something.”

“Would you like to state your last wishes?” Adrienn asked threateningly.

“Adrienn, this is not the way.” El chided her, regaining a little of his grandeur. “You ask him to say his prayers, to repent. You offer him spiritual advice before he goes on to meet his Maker.”

“Well, we have an audience.” Radomus pointed at me.

 

Oh fuck.

 

“Perhaps we could ask him for dispassionate advice on this little quarrel of ours.”

 

I glanced at all of them, feeling extremely self-conscious. Every one of them was looking at me. Cain was indignant. Adrienn wore a disapproving scowl. El and Gardevoir looked like they were inviting me to talk. Radomus looked amused. I felt every single one of my thoughts leave my brain in a hurry and find shelter somewhere that wasn’t actually connected to my mouth.

 

I hated being on display like that. I had no desire whatsoever to participate in this brawl, and, while I had seen a perfectly happy Gossip Gardevoir – to my displeasure – more than once, the situation was muddled enough. Cain wasn’t a thief, sure, but that didn’t mean that the ring wasn’t, unbeknownst to him, stolen goods. I knew that there was something not quite natural here and I didn’t want to stay to find out what exactly.

 

It was a nasty mess, but, for once, I didn’t have to get involved in it.

 

“Cain, let’s get out. There’s nothing good to be gained here.”

“And let them call me a thief?”

“Better than letting them bury you.”

“And leaving Gardevoir in this man’s hold?” he sounded ashamed.

“El claims that Luna is coerced to side with Radomus.” I replied evenly.

“He’s a rotten liar.” Cain spat.

“You don’t know that.” I corrected him, still reasonably. “You don’t like him, but it doesn’t mean that he’s lying. Moreover, if El is right, that could as easily mean that Gardevoir is coerced to side with him.”

“You think I would do that?” El asked, mastering once again a solemn, yet sad, tone.

“I don’t know.” I snarled. “Neither of you is forthcoming, and I don’t feel like unravelling the truth. Sort this out by yourself. I don’t care.”

 

 

I turned around, started to walk away, and that was when I realized it.

 

“In every issue there are always to sides; one is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil. The man who is wrong still retains some respect for the truth, if only by accepting the responsibility of choice. But the man in the middle is the knave who is willing to sit out the course of any battle, cash in on the blood of the innocent or crawl on his belly to the guilty. The man who refuses to judge, who neither agrees nor disagrees, is the man responsible for all the blood now spilled in the world.”

 

If that wasn’t the best summary of my life, what was? An Ayn Rand quote, however mangled my recollection of the book was, could have justified to stay uninvolved in the Meteor’s bloody business. It could have said something about rebooting Reborn City’s economy. Or even be used to plead with Solaris for Reborn City’s, for Apophyll’s survival. But – now? In the middle of a parentage dispute between someone who had sounded far too much like a fanatic, and someone acknowledging that they had no moral compass, deep inside the all too creepy temple of a nearly extinct religion, neither of them acknowledging truth or reason as a value?

 

Something had to be wrong with me. I turned back again.

 

“So, you want my thoughts about this?” I asked the others.

“We’ve heard them, I understand.” Adrienn pointed out. “It’s very straightforward anyway, isn’t it?”

“It’s obvious, certainly.” Radomus remarked. “I cannot comprehend how you haven’t figured it all out.”

“The Lord thwarts the schemes of the crafty so that their hands find no success. He catches the wise in their craftiness and sweeps away the plans of the cunning.” El quoted. “Your ploy has come to an end, Radomus, and we might as well indulge your last wish.”

 

Right… So, now, how was I going to put this?

 

Let’s start with the beginning. Why was I so sure that something was wrong?

 

“El.” I decided. “We’ve met before all this. You claimed you didn’t know the whereabouts of Luna. When you told me of her, you certainly didn’t imply that she had been kidnapped and brainwashed. You implied instead that ‘friends’ had enticed her to run away.”

“You’ve met him before?” the flabbergasted question shot out of Cain’s mouth.

“Yeah. You asked why I wasn’t thrilled to go here. That’s another reason why.”

“Then, I knew not for sure.” El replied. “But when Bennett told me where she had been made to live, I knew what to expect.”

 

“She had been made to live?” I questioned, noting that El had already known Radomus and that he was with Bennett.

“Why else would she end up in Vanhanen Castle?”

 

I didn’t answer the question. It was clear that El wouldn’t question what was a certainty to him and mere hearsay for me.

 

“I told you. I was there when he brainwashed Luna!” Gardevoir protested.

 

But, indeed, I had met Gossip Gardevoir before…

 

“You seemed pretty happy for yourself and Radomus when you went to meet me in Spinel Town. And when you met Cain and I at the entrance of the labyrinth.” I pointed out to Gardevoir.

“It was a show, I told you!” Gardevoir insisted, her voice tearful.

 

A show…

 

“El, did you know how Gardevoir felt?” I questioned further.

“I did not, but I suspected. There is little with this man that is not rotten to the core.” he added in a tone of disgust, pointing at Radomus, who simply kept smirking.

“Do you have a point?” Adrienn asked. “It’s clear that the two of you are in cahoots. Stop delaying. Let’s get on with it.”

“I’m not with him.” I protested.

“He most certainly isn’t.” Radomus confirmed. “Look at how confused he is. I like a better class of allies.”

 

I disdained the insult, but realized that indeed, it was certainly fair to ask Radomus his share of questions that should have clarified the answer.

 

Why was El expecting Radomus to trade Luna for Gardevoir, if the man was so fundamentally corrupt? Yet there were a thousand reasonable answers to this. Perhaps El was counting on Radomus’s desire for influence, or expecting him to strike a sucker punch to recover Gardevoir at no expense.

 

“Radomus,” I said uneasily, “why did you believe all you had to do was nothing to resolve the situation?”

“Now, I can’t be expected to tell you about my plan for the endgame, can I?” Radomus chuckled mockingly.

 

And he had cared for Luna enough that he had instantly changed his answer at her request…

 

“But ever since you’ve been here, you haven’t been very eager to reclaim Gardevoir.”

“El was asking for Luna, who – as you may have noted – is not exactly here.”

 

I hated that answer. It was formally correct and perfectly useless.

 

“You don’t seem concerned at all about what Gardevoir is repeating about you.”

“Media stars are moody, shouldn’t you know?”

“Why is Luna calling you Master, anyway?”

“She is fulfilling a fantasy, living in this castle.” Radomus explained, amused. “Some time, she will be the castle’s maid, and some other time, its princess.”

“Why don’t you listen to me?” Gardevoir asked, outraged. “I told you he had brainwashed her.”

 

And if that was the case…

 

“What else has he done, Gardevoir?” I asked the Pokemon. “El has insisted that he was a rotten swine, and he knew it before what happened to Luna.”

 

And his castle was trapped.

 

Gardevoir shuddered.

 

“I can’t say…” she muttered, eying her former Trainer. “He’ll do horrible things to me…”

“And he’s doing horrible things to other people too.” I countered. “So save them. She’s going to protect you, right?” I added for Gardevoir, pointing at Adrienn.

“They,” a frosty voice chimed in.

“I’m sorry?”

“Please use ‘they’ when referring to me.” Adrienn explained with exaggerated patience. “And get to the fucking point already.”

 

Using they for a person?

 

“I choose not to identify myself with any particular gender.” Adrienn explained on, sounding annoyed. “Like genderless Pokemon, if you want.”

 

I could worry later about category failure. I nodded at them in superficial understanding.

 

“Please, Gardevoir.” I insisted. “If you want to keep him from harming people, you cannot remain silent.”

“This does not sound dispassionate.” Radomus commented, not sounding remotely concerned.

“I’m trying to get information from people who will let it out.” I quipped back.

“But isn’t it obvious already? How can you all be standing with brains so dull? I had thought that at least you, Gabriel, would have thought of asking the right questions.”

“Ignore him.” Adrienn said, sensibly. “He knows he’s finished.”

 

I wasn’t sure about that. There was a trump card that he was holding. Probably.

 

And what was the right question anyway?

 

“He’s beating us.” Gardevoir eventually said, her voice a concerning monotone. “He’s starving us when we do not please him. Even at the best of times, he neglects us.”

 

I glanced at Adrienn. They were already seething with rage. Cain looked appalled. Radomus was undisturbed.

 

“I used to steal for him. He forced me to spy on people, blackmail them, corrupt them. He’s been committing tax fraud for the last ten years and killed the inspectors afterwards!”

“You bastard!” Adrienn yelled, enraged, and rushed Radomus.

 

It was a bad idea. Radomus struck Adrienn on their elbow mid-punch, and followed with a lightning-fast cross to the jaw. In the blink of an eye, he had grabbed Adrienn’s limp arm and twisted it near breaking point in their bended back, on which he was casually leaning.

 

How in blazes could he be so good at hand-to-hand fighting, above being a Gym Leader, a fan of disguise, and a chess grandmaster?

 

“Now,” he chuckled, “you wouldn’t want me to discuss these issues without legal counsel.”

 

Right. Nothing like a tax lawyer to make our little party more trustworthy.

 

“You see?” Gardevoir said, anguished. “That’s what he’s really like. I don’t even feel sorry for his–“ 

“Enough.” Radomus snapped, his amusement vanished, shoving unceremoniously Adrienn to the ground.

 

He snapped his fingers, and, lo and behold! Another Gardevoir, exactly similar to the Gossip Gardevoir who had been speaking, appeared in a blinding flash of pinkish light, floating next to him, while El’s knees buckled and the priest fell face-first to the floor.

 

Another Gardevoir?

 

And the Gossip Gardevoir was suddenly shrinking, losing her shape, before reverting to a pink blob.

 

“A Ditto…” Cain nearly choked. “It was a Ditto all this time.”

 

And for once, I shared his amazement.

 

 

Character rates:

Spoiler

Cain: 8+/10 (slight raise). Mostly because he didn't actually do anything too stupid. 

Radomus: 4/10 (-1). Just as annoying as before, even more so. Why is he doing all of this? 

El: 4/10 (-3). What the hell did he do? What did he expect to do with this Ditto? Has he gone crazy with worry over Luna? And why the need to disparage Cain?

Adrienn: 5/10. They probably have their heart in the right place, but they don't look too sensible about it.  

 

[MintMan]

This was a sublime read for me. Gabriel's voice was extremely strong in this chapter, and the dialogue is entertaining as ever. Even though I knew the twist was coming, it was still framed expertly. 

[Evi Crystal]

Okay, this was a tense yet amusing chapter for me to read. Radomus really captivated me with his performance (like we knew where it was going), like being the calculated Chessmaster he is. But the punch was kinda unexpected to me, wow.

[Oscarus]

I'll read that someday 

There's quite a lot of these - but maybe that is because they are short... for my standards at least. 

 

Judging by opinions, I think this fanfic is worth of reading, and maybe I will get some inspirations. 

[Aphelli]

20 hours ago, MintMan said:

This was a sublime read for me. Gabriel's voice was extremely strong in this chapter, and the dialogue is entertaining as ever. Even though I knew the twist was coming, it was still framed expertly. 

 

Thank you very much! Your comment made my day. Gabriel snapping at everyone (which is very unusual for him) along the lines of “why bring me in this convoluted mess, sort it out by yourselves!” is one of my earliest ideas, although most of the details fell into place a lot later. 

 

 

9 hours ago, Evi Crystal said:

Okay, this was a tense yet amusing chapter for me to read. Radomus really captivated me with his performance (like we knew where it was going), like being the calculated Chessmaster he is

 

Thank you Evi! A lot of this arc (canonically too) is the Radomus Show, and it would have been a shame to not do him justice. Plus, it’s totally in-character to gloat like this. 

My current headcanon is that Radomus is also doing this because he knows it annoys Gabriel. After all, what’s the point of showing off if no one realizes that’s what you’re doing? 

Also, following your Discord comment, a PSA regarding a certain name I tossed in this chapter: 

 

Spoiler

“Fischer” doesn’t refer to Eclipse – so far, at least – whose surname I had entirely forgotten. Maybe I’ll find an interesting link and it will change. But this name could have rung another bell… 

 

 

8 hours ago, Oscarus said:

I'll read that someday 

There's quite a lot of these - but maybe that is because they are short... for my standards at least. 

 

I’m glad you decided to! Yes, that makes a lot of chapters. I don’t know if they’re short by your standards – the early ones are around 2.5-3k words long, the later ones are maybe 3.5-5k words long. The total word count should be approximately 225k words, half-way between Deathy Hallows and Order of the Phoenix.

 

8 hours ago, Oscarus said:

Judging by opinions, I think this fanfic is worth of reading, and maybe I will get some inspirations. 

I hope you’ll keep feeling this way (and that you won’t mind the more… unusual takes that this story has).