Chapter 7: Present Day
Sam had thought Barry was moving fast when they were just on their way to the lake yesterday, but he realized he hadn’t seen fast until the young man, abandoning camp and all of their belongings, raced along the edge of the lake in an attempt to get to the northern side. His feet came down so hard and so quickly, he almost trampled a family of Bidoof who weren‘t aware of his presence until nearly too late.
“Barry!” Sam called out from behind him as he did his best to stay caught up. “Barry, what’s going on? You’re leaving all of our supplies behind!”
“You can stay with them if you want, but I’d rather you came with me. So either keep up or don’t!” Barry’s gait hardly changed as he yelled the order back to Sam.
Sam had no time at all to be indecisive, and he knew it. If he paused to consider his actions for even a moment, Barry would be out of sight. With that realization, Sam increased his speed in an effort to stay just behind Barry’s trail of dust. He still had no idea why Barry was running so fervently, but it was obvious that the sound from the other side of the lake had awoken something dire within the young man. It was a side of Barry that Sam had seen no sign of yesterday.
After a few minutes of a dead sprint around the periphery of Lake Verity, Barry finally slowed down, placing his right arm over his chest as he did so. Sam knew Barry must have been feeling the same vice squeezing his lungs that he did. Their pace reduced itself to a quickened walk, and Sam finally had enough time to realize wherever they were rushing off to, they were doing it in their pajamas. Sam tried to imagine whatever creature was making the mechanical beeping noise being intimidated by his flannel sweatpants and white tank top, but it seemed all-too-unlikely. Somewhere in his haste, he had lost one of his knitted slippers, and he tried to calculate if having one was any more ridiculous than either having both or just being barefoot. He settled on kicking the other one off to match his bare feet; he could recover the socks when they came back around the lake.
“Did you bring your pokemon?”
Sam was almost shocked that Barry had spoken; he hadn’t said anything since demanding Sam’s decision. Sam’s hand went to the exterior of his pockets and he felt the three lumps within. “I did, yeah. Why--”
“Good. You sleep with them? Smart.” Barry was still not even turning his head to Sam when he spoke, choosing instead to keep his eyes locked on the shoreline. He really must not have wanted to lose even a step’s worth of his speed, even while recuperating from the sprint.
“I guess. I just--”
“Do you know anything about the beeps?”
“The beeps? You mean the noise? No, how would I? I just got here--”
“It has nothing to do with you?”
Sam desperately wanted to finish a thought without another interruption, but this question wrecked into his brain like a runaway car. “What? With me? No, no it’s not.”
Barry nodded and picked up his pace to a light jog. His vice must have loosened somewhat. Sam wished his chest would tell him the same. Nevertheless, he increased his own speed to match.
The beeping that had saved Sam from his nightmare grew louder as they rounded Verity. Sometimes it would disappear for minutes at a time, only to re-emerge later. As they got closer, other sounds began mixing in. First, a heavy, rapid sound of two hard materials colliding. After that, the sound of hydraulics. What they were approaching was definitely man-made. Not only that, but it had to be some kind of heavy machinery. He was considering the implications of that thought when he saw that Barry had come to a stop and was crouching. The motion he made with his hand signaled Sam to do the same.
Maybe a hundred yards of trees and shrubs separated Sam and Barry from a small construction force in a clearing of the woods. There was a large, orange backhoe that emitted a cautionary beep--the sound that he had been chasing--when it needed to back up. Not far from the backhoe sat an idling bulldozer and a matching orange breaker. All three pieces of machinery had the same picture of a fiery bird blazoned on their doors. There was obviously a man in the backhoe steering it backwards off a mound of dirt the equipment must have dug up, but the other vehicles seemed empty, and half a dozen men milled about outside them, all clad in matching construction hats and red jumpsuits. There were too far away for Sam to discern anything they could be saying.
“What do you think is going on here?” As Sam turned to Barry to get an answer to his question, he found the young man snapping pictures with his cell phone. Sam stared on as Barry then began inputting information into the touchscreen. “What are you doing?”
“Sending these pics to the professor. You seriously don’t know these guys?”
“What? No. I told you--”
“Awesome. Good. Okay, I have to call him. Hold on.”
Another statement interrupted by Barry, but Sam was much less concerned about this one. Barry pulled the phone to his ear, and Sam went back to studying the crew. The last man working exited the backhoe and joined his partners on the ground, studying the hole that Sam figured the breaker and backhoe joined forces to bore.
“Professor Rowan, hey it’s me. Did you get the pictures I sent you?...Good...Yeah, they’re just here at the north side of the lake...So did you recognize the emblem on...Phoenix Shipping Corporation?...No, I never heard of it...” Sam’s eyes shot back-and-forth between Barry and the workers by their equipment. It seemed impossible that they could hear Barry at this distance, but what if they could? Were they allowed to be here while this crew was working? Barry’s conversation continued, “Well that doesn’t sound so bad...No, he’s right here with me, he doesn’t seem to know these guys...Yeah, I believe him. I am not particularly suspicious of guys who whimper in their sleep...Do we have permission to?...Awesome...Oh, you know I can, but what about--CHRIST!”
When the ground shook, it dislodged the phone from Barry’s hand, sending it into a bush several feet away. Both Sam and Barry toppled to the ground as the floor of the forest revolted beneath their feet. Sam felt a sticky rain trickle down on him, but only for a moment--it stopped as suddenly as the earthquake underneath him had. He reached to the back of his head to feel the wetness of the rain, but it was more than wet. It was also thick, and when he brought his hand back around, he could see it was white and brown. He lifted his gaze to the trees, and that’s when it hit him: whatever had so suddenly startled himself and Barry seemed to also scare the birds and the pokemon in the trees above them. “Son of a--”
“Hey, are you okay? What was that?”
Sam’s attention was called back to the more pressing matter. “I don’t know...” Suddenly a thought hit him. “Well those guys dug a hole, right? Maybe they set off some kind of explosive when the hole got deeper than their machines could go?”
“Those idiots. Look, Sam, I know you’re here to see Mesprit or whatever, but I might need your help, and you’d be doing Professor Rowan a favor, too. You want to come help me stop some unlicensed construction?”
Barry was right enough that this was not why Sam had come to this lake. Whatever this was, it really wasn’t his business, and what authority did he or Barry have to tell these guys what they could or could not do? But when Sam thought past that, he concluded that he might never see Mesprit with these people here destroying the forest. “Sure. Whatever. I mean, I guess. But what do we--”
Barry pulled two of his pokeballs out of his pocket. They were plain red-and-white pokeballs, the cheap kind that were generally so undependable that they were used almost exclusively to catch fresh, defenseless hatchlings. “Follow my lead.”
Barry shot out of their cover and into the clearing where the men worked. “Excuse me, gentlemen!” he called out, “I’ve come to check your paperwork and licensing for your project here today!”
The men began exchanging words with each other, but Sam could not understand them; not because he was too far away now, but because they were speaking in a language he did not know. Now that Sam was closer, he could see the skin tone of these men was slightly different from his own, as if they had a permanent suntan, and that’s when it hit him: they were no more native to Sinnoh than he was. They must have come from one of the equatorial regions. One of them, a man with full, bushy sideburns, stepped forward from the rest. He was not as thickly built as Sam imagined construction workers to be, but maybe with so many machines and explosives doing the work, he did not need to be. “Hey, kids. This is not a playground, there are dangerous stuff at work here. I am sorry if we did startle you, but you are going to have to get go from here.” The man’s imperfect speech and accent seemed to confirm what Sam already suspected.
“Happy to,” Barry smiled at the worker, “just as soon as we check to see if all your paperwork is in order. Verity Forest is protected land, after all.”
Sideburns turned back to his group and shouted something in what was probably his native tongue. His coworkers replied in kind, and he turned back to Barry. “Child, I am to be serious. You have to leave. It is,” he put his hand on a Great Ball that hung from his belt by a keychain, “not safe here for you.”
That was apparently all Barry needed. Both of his arms pressed forward, red energy flashing forth from his two pokeballs. In the space between himself and Sideburns materialized two pokemon: one, a child-sized monkey with red and blue warpaint on its face and flames dancing on the end of its tail; the other a tortoise creature that was easily the size of a large SUV. Sam recognized them from the tour guides he had read about Sinnoh as a Monferno and a Torterra, respectively. The Torterra was especially impressive, having a fully grown small tree sprouting from its shell and protective, rocky plates growing out from the sides of its head. Upon its emergence, it sat perfectly still except for its head, which moved to study its environment. The Monferno shuffled swiftly from side-to-side and stretched its knuckles to crack them.
Sideburns yelled something back to his crew while he unhooked his Great Ball. Sam braced for them to rush forward to help him, but they instead turned towards the heavy equipment and raced for them. Energy was just emerging from Sideburns’ ball when Barry yelled to Sam.
“You deal with whatever he’s got! I’m going to stop those guys! Torterra, fissure away those vehicles!”
The massive tortoise slammed its oak-like left front leg about a foot deep into the forest floor. A crack in the earth broke under the breaker, and the machine teetered sideways into it. Sam tried to watch to see if anything was happening to the other devices, but his view was suddenly obscured by a large, rotund pokemon. Sam was familiar with it as a Hariyama on only a rudimentary level from the studying he did when he was still active in the World Pokemon League. He never had the displeasure of actually seeing one in person until now. It’s huge, three-fingered palms swayed in the air in front of him, and its thick eyebrows formed a menacing V-pattern on its forehead.
Sam fumbled for his pocket. He had never been in a purely confrontational fight before; all of his previous battles, many though they had been, were either friendly spars or WPL matches. He found the Nest Ball in his left pocket and squeezed it one time, bringing Bree forward in a flush of energy. While the boy he was with was destroying Sideburns’ machines, it seemed a bad time for Sam to ask what the rules might be for this fight. Sideburns yelled something to Hariyama in the language Sam couldn’t understand, and the massive fighting-type brought its flattened hand down in a chop onto Bree. She reeled backwards from the impact, but managed to stay airborne.
“Hey! I can’t understand that! That’s...really unfair.” Sam found that he was pointing an accusing finger at the foreigner. Sideburns shouted another mystery order, but this time, Sam had his bearings more together. “Bree, fly up! Just...stay away from it!”
Hariyama’s right leg whipped around to kick Bree, but she had managed to narrowly avoid the impact by flying several feet into the air. “Yeah, you can yell all the gibberish you want now, but your fatty ninja pokemon can’t fly, so why don’t you calm down? We just asked to see your license and paperwork!” Sideburns scowled in response and let out another roar that did not sound like the friendly invitation to drink coffee and sort this all out that Sam had hoped for.
Hariyama bent forward and slammed both of its hands into the ground in front of him. After a second of straining, it pulled a clump of dirt and stone the size of an oven from the earth and pitched it at Bree in one fluid movement. The Butterfree was struck by the rock, but still managed to use her ability to fly to roll with the impact and stay aloft. Sideburns opened his mouth to call another attack.
“Oh, I’m done with this. Butterfree, psychic the heck out of tubby and end this!”
Bree zipped down and landed directly on top of Hariyama’s head. She dug her blue feet and paws into the fighting-type’s scalp and splayed her wings wide. Visibly, nothing else seemed to happen until Hariyama screamed in agony. It fell onto its belly, defeated.
“Do you yield?” Sam had no idea why he barked those words, but he had to admit to himself: it sounded really good. Sideburns recalled his Hariyama and took three hesitating steps backwards. When it seemed that Sam and Bree were not pursuing him, he turned and rushed off into the woods. Sam noticed the rest of his group must have already fled there; it was now just Sam, Barry, their pokemon, and some wrecked machinery.
“Really? ‘Do you yield’? That’s the direction you decided to go there?”
Sam shrugged. “It felt right.”
“I thought you were threatening to cut his head off.”
“I think he thought so, too. Did you see him book it out of here?”
Barry rolled his eyes. “Yeah, you’re a lion among men, what with your bird poop hair and your night whimpering”
“Oh, you caught both of those, huh?" The adrenaline from the fight was beginning to fade, and Sam’s thoughts went back to the lake. Had those guys frightened away Mesprit? Would he still have a chance to catch it after all the ruckus they had made? He was removed from his thoughts by a sudden sensation on his back; Barry’s Monferno jumped up onto his shoulders and bounced in place. He panted heavily into Sam’s ear.
“Hey, stranger danger! We talked about this.” Monferno waved Barry’s words off and continued to happily bounce around on Sam’s back. “Eh,” Barry continued, “I guess he knows you’re with me. He likes everyone, though. Don’t be too proud of it.”
Sam scratched Monferno’s large, oval ears. “What do we do now?”
“Well you’re here to play Lake Warrior or whatever, but I’ve got to get back to Professor Rowan. These guys work for some shipping company that just opened in Canalave City. No idea what they’d be doing here. If you want to come along, I wouldn’t say no.”
Sam knew he had a decision to make. This wasn’t why he’d come here, and he had no idea what it even was. He did know that it was none of his business, and it certainly wasn’t going to help Tommy. But seeing Mesprit seemed less likely than ever now. Maybe, he thought, if he went back to Sandgem Town with Barry, he could take the time to study what he now knew of Lake Verity and find its secrets.
So I don't really need grammar lessons as much as I just need someone to occasionally point out what I mistyped. 