Chapter 32: Direction [part 1]
As promised, Chapter 32!
Unfortunately, this is a bit of an inconvenient chapter to be posting immediately after a massive hiatus; the writing kind of assumes you at least vaguely remember what's been going on recently. So, again, I recommend at least skimming Chapter 31 to get back up to speed, if you don't remember much.
Anyway, huge, huge apologies for the wait, and I hope you enjoy.
Grudgingly, Carrie dropped her Poké Balls into the palm of the huge Bad Light member walking beside her through the nighttime forest. She really didn’t have much choice; with him and the man on her other side no doubt carrying full teams of six each, her five exhausted Pokémon wouldn’t have stood a chance.
“How did you even manage to find me?” she growled, directing her question at the third Bad Light member whom she could just about make out walking in front of her, his hands held nonchalantly behind his back. “You couldn’t possibly have known I was in that Secret Base.”
Andrew grinned as he looked back at her over his shoulder. “You’ve got one Vanessa Swift to thank for that,” he said. “After you mentioned her, I asked one of the guys to look into her background, which in his language apparently meant ‘hack into her laptop’. Turns out she’s running a program that shows her – and now us – exactly where that Master Ball is and whether or not it’s occupied. Convenient, eh?” His eyes twinkled slyly. “Aren’t you glad you told us about her now?”
Carrie ground her teeth in frustration. Both Vanessa and MemorCorp had been tracking her from a distance, had they? That explained why Velotus hadn’t spotted anyone tailing them last night. It also meant that Vanessa knew Archopy had been captured now and would probably be heading this way. Where was Vanessa, anyway? Carrie hadn’t seen her in what felt like ages.
“Surely it would have been simpler just to follow me directly anyway?” she asked bitterly.
Andrew shrugged and faced forward again. “More fun this way. Besides, aren’t you glad we stopped your little friend getting away? You two must have so much to catch up on.” There was an inordinate amount of glee in his voice at that last statement, something Carrie couldn’t help but feel apprehensive about.
Their trek through the forest had brought them to a somewhat flatter, more open area of the hill, where Carrie could make out through the darkness a row of small trucks built for carrying a dozen or so people in the back. Presumably this was how Bad Light had got here; clearly, it was also how she would be leaving here. Andrew led her past the nearest one, and the next nearest, seemingly arbitrarily choosing one further down the row with which to fling the doors to the back open with a dramatic flourish.
Carrie peered into the gloom; it was dark enough that all she could make out was two low benches on either side. A rough shove at her back from one of the other men prompted her to climb inside and sit on a bench, though not without scowling at the man in the process. Andrew jumped in behind her, shutting the doors with a clang and plunging them into further darkness. From the sounds and the vague shapes she could make out, it looked like Andrew had sat himself down right next to the doors and put his feet up on the opposite bench, forming a barrier between her and freedom with his legs. There didn’t seem much chance of Carrie escaping, then – not with her Pokémon in the hands of one of the other men whom she could hear getting into the front.
As the truck rumbled to life, faint streaks of light made their way in above and between the doors, presumably from the truck’s headlights, making it marginally easier to see. With a splutter, the vehicle began to move, juddering up and down across the hilly ground.
“I don’t suppose there’s any point asking where you’re taking me,” Carrie said.
Andrew perked up from the relaxed posture he’d shifted into. “Of course there is!” he said. “Thought you’d never ask. The Director wants you at MemorCorp.”
“What?” said Carrie. “Does she want to talk to me in person this time or something?”
“Nope,” Andrew replied. “I don’t think she really gives a damn about you any more now that she’s got Archopy. She just wants to keep a closer eye on you so you don’t do anything stupid like tell people her plans.” He gave a mock-frown. “Savage got all annoyed because she made it sound like she doesn’t trust us to keep you quiet out here. He wanted to try and accidentally kill you again, you know.” He grinned. “Still, I reckon it’ll be fine. I’m sure we can find some syringes containing something that isn’t water this time once we’re back at MemorCorp, don’t you think?”
Carrie gritted her teeth, repressing a frustrated groan. As long as they had her Grovyle and some of that evolution serum, she wouldn’t be able to do a thing. She hated the fact that a simple chemical gave them so much control over her.
Andrew just beamed.
Folding her arms huffily, Carrie stared at the cloth-covered roof of the truck. MemorCorp was somewhere on the outskirts of Petalburg City – halfway across Hoenn from Steel Hill. And Carrie’s only company on the journey was to be Andrew. Great.
On second thoughts, Carrie wasn’t entirely sure that they were alone in there. A sort of wheezing sound, like somebody’s laboured breathing, was coming from the opposite corner of the space. Squinting in that direction, she could make out the shape of a person huddled in the shadows now that her eyes were more accustomed to the near-darkness. With what seemed like a great effort, the person in question heaved themselves upright, shifting out of the dark as they did so, and Carrie saw Theo staring back at her through the gloom.
“You,” she hissed.
Theo gritted his teeth and didn’t respond. He couldn’t, Carrie realised; she could see him struggling to breathe, his sitting position stiff and awkward. It seemed he was paralysed – that would be the second time for him in about two days.
It occurred to Carrie that she ought to feel sorry for him, but she wasn’t about to start pitying the man who had tried to capture Archopy for his own selfish gain, who’d been planning to do so all along. Instead, she glared daggers at him across the truck’s interior. Theo jerked his head in what might have been a dismissive headshake and directed his pained gaze down at the floor.
With a way-too-wide grin, Andrew pulled something out of his pocket, reached towards Theo and sprayed the contents of a small bottle in his face. Theo coughed and spluttered and began to relax, his posture becoming gradually less stiff.
Carrie recalled the last time their captors had decided to ease Theo’s paralysis for no apparent reason and gave Andrew a quizzical look. “Okay, so I get why you did it the last time,” she said, “but why un-paralyse him this time? It’s not like we’re going to be talking to anyone important anytime soon.”
“No,” Andrew admitted, “but this would be no fun if only one of you could speak.” He said it as though he was pointing out something obvious.
Carrie stared, then shook her head dismissively and rounded on Theo. She opened her mouth to fire some kind of scathing comment at him, but he spoke first.
“I suppose you’re happy now.” Theo’s voice was laced with so much bitterness that it barely sounded like him. Accusing eyes stared out at Carrie from beneath his matted fringe.
“What?”
“I suppose you’re happy,” he repeated. “Archopy’s going back to MemorCorp to be put through hell again. But that’s okay, because it means her species comes back and you finally get to vindicate your silly little hatred for Sceptile.”
Carrie flinched. She’d never heard Theo be this venomous before, nor had he ever hit so uncomfortably close to home.
“After all, it’s not like you actually care about her wellbeing specifically, is it?” Theo went on. “She’s not your Pokémon. Why should you care?”
“She’s not yours either,” Carrie snapped back instantly. She really wished he’d stop labouring under the delusion that he somehow deserved to own Archopy.
“Excuse me?” he replied. “I dug up her fossil. I asked for her to be revived. She was caught with a ball which I threw. Whether you think I deserve her or not – which, by the way, has no bearing on anything – how in the world is she not mine?”
“If I could just chip in,” Andrew said, “a Pokémon’s trainer is always registered as the one who threw the ball, regardless of where the ball came from. So yes, Theo here does officially own Archopy now.” He grinned infuriatingly at Carrie. “Sorry, Grovyle-girl.”
Carrie scowled. It was almost plausible to believe that Andrew was lying for the sake of messing with her – except, now that he mentioned it, she remembered Sam saying the exact same thing a few days ago. Which meant that Archopy was technically Theo’s Pokémon now.
Damn it.
“That doesn’t change anything!” she snarled. “You had no right to just grab her without giving her a chance!”
“You have no right to just cart her off back to MemorCorp without giving her a chance, either,” Theo shot back, fixing her with a piercing glare. “Didn’t you say that she’d said no?”
“Well, yes, but…” Carrie broke off and frowned. “Wait, since when did Archopy being brought back to MemorCorp have anything to do with me?” She glared briefly at Andrew. “That’s down to his lot.”
“True,” Theo admitted, his voice dark and resentful, “but then why aren’t you complaining?”
“What? As if complaining would…”
Carrie stopped herself. Theo was right; she hadn’t objected once she’d found out Archopy was headed back to MemorCorp. Did that mean she was okay with it after all, despite it being against Archopy’s wishes? Could she just as easily have been the one to throw the Master Ball and hand it off to Andrew if Theo hadn’t got there first?
She shook her head savagely. “No, I’ll tell you why I’m not complaining any more. It’s because at least she hasn’t ended up with you.”
“Wha…?” It took Theo a second try to find the steel in his voice again. “What? In what way exactly would that have been worse for her than MemorCorp?”
“In the ‘you acted like a crazed, selfish madman back in the Secret Base’ way,” Carrie pointed out. “Trust me, Theo, you didn’t exactly look like the kind of guy Archopy would want to spend the rest of her life with. I mean, what sort of trainer leaves the rest of his Pokémon behind to run off with the one he’s just caught?”
“I had to do that,” said Theo a little too quickly. His eyes were hidden by the shadows for a moment. “I had no choice.” Abruptly he went back to staring accusingly at Carrie. “You gave me no choice! If you’d actually understood why I needed to do this, then I wouldn’t have had to stop you coming after me!”
A snickering sound had started up in the other corner of the truck. “Hang on, hang on,” Andrew said, looking between the two of them as if they were in on some big joke he was missing. “So Theo’s Pokémon were in that Secret Base?” He let out a cackle and turned to Carrie. “And that’s why it took you so long to get out even after Arcanine torched it?”
“Torched it?” came a hoarse whisper from Theo.
Andrew was still laughing to himself. “Oh, Carrie, why didn’t you tell me?” he giggled. “I could have got some of the guys to go in and grab them before we left. We needed more –”
“You leave them alone,” Theo hissed, his voice wavering slightly despite the force in it. He whipped around to Carrie, his fixed glare harsher than ever. “This is your fault,” he said. “If you could just get it, if you could even try to understand what goes on in other people’s heads instead of staying in your own little world…”
Carrie snorted. “Then what? I’d have just happily let you run away with Archopy? I don’t think so.”
Theo shook his head witheringly. “You really don’t get it,” he muttered.
“What exactly is there to get?” Carrie asked, staring. “You wanted Archopy, you somehow managed to convince yourself it was because you could ‘help’ her, and here we are.”
“I can help her!” he insisted, that I-am-in-the-right gleam in his eyes again for a moment, and then it fell. “I could have helped her, if that lot hadn’t…” He turned to glare darkly at Andrew.
The Bad Light member held up his hands in a placating gesture. “Hey, me and the guys are just doing our jobs here,” he said. “If you want to get all fiery at someone for opposing you on principle –” he indicated Carrie – “point yourself back at her.”
Theo’s glare didn’t let up. “You did your job by torching the Secret Base?”
Andrew shrugged. “Had to get her out of it somehow. Hey, I didn’t even know your Pokémon were in there. It was nothing personal.” He waved a hand towards Carrie. “Go on, go back to blaming her for forcing you to send them out in the first place.”
Theo stared between the two of them, seeming momentarily at a loss.
Carrie raised an eyebrow. “So apparently I ‘forced’ you to leave your Pokémon in there,” she said. “Because I couldn’t understand how you were going to help Archopy, or something. Well, let’s say I want to try and understand now: how exactly were you going to help Archopy? Honestly, I’m kind of curious here.”
“I… I was going to talk to her. To gain her trust.” Theo’s voice was a lot smaller and quieter than it had been moments ago. “Then I could help her get over those memories of hers.”
“And how was that going to work?” Carrie asked. “Even if you did somehow manage to gain her trust, which, let’s face it, is pretty impossible –” she noticed Theo flinch and not meet her eye at those words – “how exactly were you going to help her get over the memories? I mean, you don’t even have a way to understand her language. What on earth were you planning to do?”
“At least I was going to try!” Theo exclaimed, suddenly defensive again. “That’s more than I saw you offering to do, even though you do have a way to understand her.”
Carrie was thrown for a second, before she shook her head. “No, this is not about me – you just basically admitted that you had absolutely no idea what you were going to do to ‘help’ Archopy once you’d caught her. Are you still going to pretend you didn’t do this out of some kind of selfish greed?”
“I didn’t!” he insisted, a hint of pleading in his eyes. “You have to understand; I really did want to help her. I just…” He sighed, drooping. “I just don’t suppose I ever really thought I’d get that far.”
Carrie almost laughed. “Wait, what?” she said incredulously. “You didn’t even think you’d get that far, but you still went for it? If you knew this would be a gigantic failure, why…?”
“Someone had to try and help her,” Theo said, the desperate insistence in his voice beginning to sound like a broken record. “No-one else seemed to care – you were perfectly fine with her being carted back off to MemorCorp once you heard the Director’s wonderful plan –” he said those last words with a heavy dose of irony, and then jerked his head at Andrew – “and they clearly don’t give a damn about her. Who else was going to help her if not me?”
“Oh, stop acting like you’re the world’s only goody-two-shoes,” Carrie snapped irritably. Something suddenly occurred to her. “In fact, yeah, you’re really not. Whose fault is it that Archopy even has those memories? Who brought her fossil to MemorCorp in the first place?”
She smirked as the horrified realisation hit Theo.
There was a cackle from the opposite corner. “Ouch,” Andrew commented, giving Carrie a grin and a thumbs-up.
“No,” Theo murmured, staring down at the floor, shaking his head numbly. “I didn’t… I didn’t know they were going to do that to her. It’s not my fault.”
“Yeah, but it really wouldn’t have taken you that long to find out,” Andrew pointed out. “MemorCorp. Clue’s in the name.”
“I… it all went so fast.” Theo lifted his head to shift his pleading gaze between the two of them. “Milo had a new job, and I was too excited about discovering the fossil… I didn’t think to ask…”
“What you basically just said is that it was your fault,” Carrie said.
Theo grimaced and looked away, hiding his face in the shadows. “I didn’t mean to hurt her,” he mumbled, his voice small and pathetic. “You have to believe me. I would never mean to hurt her.”
Carrie smirked. “Oh, of course,” she said. “But Archopy isn’t the only Pokémon you completely didn’t mean to screw up, is she?”
Andrew’s eyes lit up at this. “She isn’t?”
“Armaldo.” Carrie gave Theo a scrutinising gaze. “You took his fossil to some place that forgot to put his brain in, am I right? And even though you’ve tried to ‘help’ him, that hasn’t exactly got very far over however long you’ve had him, has it?”
“No…” Theo lifted his head out of the shadows, a ghost of the fierce glare from before back in his eyes. “Leave Armaldo out of this. This has nothing to do with him.”
Andrew made an exaggerated coughing noise that sounded a lot like “Denial!”
Carrie glanced at him then back at Theo, a grin spreading across her face. “Wait, it does? You mean this does have something to do with Armaldo?” She laughed. “Oh, but of course! This has everything to do with Armaldo, doesn’t it?”
Theo winced, his face becoming half-hidden by darkness again.
“Yeah – you couldn’t fix Armaldo, so you thought that if you could fix Archopy instead, that would make up for it! I’m right, aren’t I?”
Theo shifted further into the shadows and said nothing.
Carrie gave a sly grin. “Sooo,” she said, “lemme just confirm this one more time. Are you still going to claim that when you threw the Master Ball at Archopy, you were doing it entirely for her sake?”
There was a long pause.
“I don’t know,” came Theo’s voice at last, all the fight utterly drained from it. “Yeah, you’re probably right. I probably am just a selfish madman.” This time, his bitterness was very much directed at himself. “So there you are. You win. Congratulations. I suppose you’re happy now.” He huddled further into his corner until she could barely see him at all through the shadows.
Carrie stared numbly at him. She’d imagined that she’d get some satisfaction out of making Theo stop pretending and admit everything was his fault, but the feeling just didn’t seem to want to come.
“So,” Andrew piped up from the other corner, his eyes twinkling with curiosity, “that Armaldo that Archie grabbed off him when he captured him doesn’t have a brain?”
“Oh, shut up,” Carrie muttered. “I don’t see why you were acting like you were on my side there.”
He frowned at her, looking genuinely puzzled. “I wasn’t.”
The ride continued on in silence. With nothing left to occupy her, Carrie’s thoughts drifted to the doubts that the argument with Theo had seeded in her mind. Would she really have ended up giving Archopy to MemorCorp against her will if Theo hadn’t thrown the ball first? Should she be trying to help Archopy get over her memories instead, considering that she did have a way to understand her?
Carrie shook her head in frustration. There was no point thinking about any of that. Things simply hadn’t happened that way, and that was the end of it.
But in the dark confines of the truck as they drew ever closer to MemorCorp, there really wasn’t that much else to think about.
After what felt like a long time but might have only been a few minutes, the shape in the shadows shifted. “My Pokémon,” Theo said, sounding so pitiful and broken that Carrie almost felt sorry for him until she reminded herself who this man was and shoved the feeling aside. “Were they okay?”
Carrie snorted. “Oh, yeah, first they had a huge battle against my Pokémon – mostly Grass-types, I should point out – and then the place got torched. I’m sure they’re fine.”
“But…” She caught a glimpse of the dull glint of Theo’s eyes as he looked at her from the shadows. “They will be okay. Won’t they?”
She shrugged. “How should I know? I got smoked out of the place by him,” she said, nodding at Andrew.
Andrew wasn’t contributing to this particular discussion. He merely grinned disconcertingly.
“And anyway,” Carrie went on, “we’re being taken back to MemorCorp. You’re not even going to be able to see them again for ages. So it’s not like it really matters right now, does it?”
“Of course it matters,” Theo mumbled sadly from the darkness. “It always matters.”
The first thing Kabutops became aware of as he regained consciousness was the smell of burnt vegetation. The next was that he still hurt – the terrible ache of the Grass energy that had seeped into him throughout the battle lingered throughout his exoskeleton, along with the stinging of burns, though that felt tiny by comparison. The pain was such that it took him a moment to clear his head. He wasn’t used to waking up injured; most of the time, his trainer would have –
His trainer. Everything that Theo had done came flooding back to Kabutops. At the forefront of it all was his order not to let Carrie escape and follow him no matter what happened. Kabutops looked frantically around the blackened interior of the Secret Base, but to no avail. The only others there were Aerodactyl, Omanyte and Cradily, all still unconscious and covered in scorch marks. Carrie and her Pokémon must have escaped in the confusion of the fire.
Kabutops hung his head. He and the others had let their trainer down.
He was worried about Theo. It wasn’t the fact that he’d caught Archopy – it went without saying that any Pokémon from a fossil Theo had dug up was his if he wanted – it was the way he’d gone about doing it. Kabutops had known his trainer his whole life, and he knew when Theo didn’t truly believe in something he was saying. If the man had complete conviction that he was right in capturing Archopy, then he wouldn’t have done it like this. He wouldn’t have gone behind Carrie’s back. He wouldn’t have run away and left his Pokémon behind to stop her following. He wouldn’t have sprung it on them all without any warning like this.
Kabutops wished that Theo had thought to talk to one of them about this beforehand, sometime when Carrie wasn’t around. If he’d just been able to get it off his chest, Kabutops felt sure that he wouldn’t have been so horribly conflicted about it all. They’d have reassured him that what he was doing was right.
Shaking his head sadly, Kabutops pushed himself to his feet. He needed to talk to the others.
Aerodactyl had seemingly already come around on his own; his eyes snapped open at the sound of Kabutops’ dragged steps. The pterodactyl pulled his feet under him and stretched his wings out stiffly. “She escaped, then,” he muttered ruefully.
Kabutops nodded mutely as he walked over to Omanyte and nudged her shell. After a few tries, her round eyes blinked from within the opening, and she squirmed her way out of hiding. “What do we do now?” she asked, glancing nervously around the empty Secret Base.
Not knowing the answer to that question, Kabutops tried to put it out of mind for now and focus on waking up Cradily – given her part-Grass typing, the fire must have hurt her the most. He tried poking one of her tentacles with the blunt part of his scythe. “Cradily,” he said. The tentacle twitched, but there was no other response. He poked it again, and then the one next to it. “Come on, Cradily, wake up. The green human escaped. We need to figure out what to do now.”
The tentacles began to undulate slowly, and finally one of her eyes opened a little, a yellow slit within the black groove on her face. “Tried to stop her,” she mumbled. “Couldn’t let her go after Master.” The eye closed again. “Failed.”
“So what do we do now?” came Aerodactyl’s voice from behind her. “Couldn’t we just go out there and find her before she gets to him?”
Kabutops shook his head. “I don’t think any of us are capable of chasing a human right now,” he said. “And we were out for a while – she might have already found him. Or…” He closed his eyes, not wanting to think of the other implications. “…someone else might have.”
“They won’t,” piped up Omanyte, sounding oddly cheery given the circumstances. “No-one will find him. Father can get away from anyone!”
Kabutops almost shot her a disbelieving look but dropped it and averted his gaze as he realised just how she could say that with such conviction. Omanyte was still young. She still utterly idolised Theo; in her eyes, he was invincible. She hadn’t yet realised that he was as fallible as any other being. The rest of them had been through that when they’d seen him struggle to come to terms with Anorith’s condition. But that had been before he’d dug Omanyte’s fossil up.
Kabutops grimaced inwardly. This was going to be tough for her.
“You say that, but what if he hasn’t got away?” Aerodactyl hissed, with a glare that made Omanyte shrink back into her shell. “We should go after the green human right now, never mind how tired we are.” He gave his wings a furious flap and promptly winced in pain.
“We stay here,” Cradily said forcefully. She heaved her head up from the ground with what looked like a huge effort. “Master promised to come back for us. Master keeps his promises. Even if…” Trailing off, she glanced away, her tentacles twitching in discomfort.
Omanyte squeaked in agreement. “He will!”
Aerodactyl growled under his breath but didn’t say anything. Kabutops found himself agreeing with the pterosaur’s sentiments. He wished he could have had Omanyte’s innocent belief that everything would automatically be all right, but he knew it would not be that simple.
“Okay,” he said, waving a scythe to try and get those thoughts out of his head and think logically. “Assuming he manages to get away from everyone who’s after him and sort things out with Archopy so he can come back for us, how will he know where to find us? We all know he’s not very good with forests.”
“Master promised,” Cradily insisted, staring down at the ground with fervent resolve. “Master would search forever until he found us.”
Kabutops had to agree with her there, but even so, he’d been there when they’d entered this Secret Base. The entrance was incredibly easy to overlook; he worried that Theo would struggle to find it again in a huge forest, even if he knew what he was looking for. It would have been bad enough when it was still intact – now that it’d been burned…
A horrifying thought struck Kabutops. He looked worriedly at the walls of the base. The vegetation had been blackened to a crisp, and there were gaping holes in some places – holes through which he couldn’t actually see the outside. Only a surreal kind of dim light made its way in through them, like starlight but without any stars.
“We definitely need to get out of here,” he said. He tried to sound urgent, but his voice just came out full of dread. “If we even can.”
“What does that mean?” hissed Aerodactyl.
“We’re in what humans call a Secret Base,” Kabutops explained. “It may sound strange, but even though the inside is this big, the outside of this place is just a small mound of grass with a hole in it. Except now, that mound of grass has been burned. I’m not sure anything can get in any more.”
“Master can’t… get in?” Cradily’s tentacles lost their usual rhythmic wiggle and became very still.
“Can we get out?” Aerodactyl asked, his eyes flicking towards the holes and the strange light coming through them.
“I really hope so,” Kabutops said, following his gaze, “because that’s the only way our trainer will ever be able to find us again.” He paused awkwardly. “That decides it, then. We have to leave here, at least. We’ll… work out what to do after that once we get out.”
He tried to ignore the glare Aerodactyl gave him out of the corner of his eye. Kabutops felt like he’d somehow become the unofficial leader of the group, but he wasn’t sure if he deserved the role. Had Theo been there, leading them all like he always did, he’d know exactly what to do. Without him, Kabutops was afraid that any decision he made would end up being the wrong one.
But at least he was sure that leaving the Secret Base was a good move, he told himself. That was a start. He warily began to approach one of the holes in the wall, Aerodactyl and Omanyte following behind him.
“Wait!”
It was Cradily. She hadn’t moved to follow – because she couldn’t.
“Can’t leave me…” she muttered feverishly. “I… I have to see Master again. Don’t leave me… please…”
Kabutops screwed his eyes shut, hating himself. For a moment he couldn’t even bring himself to turn around and face Cradily. She sounded quietly terrified of the thought of being alone in here forever. And he’d almost left her there. Theo would never have forgotten about her.
“Cradily…” He opened his eyes and turned to her. “I’m sorry. You’re right.” He walked back up to her, beckoning Omanyte and Aerodactyl to do the same. “We’ll have to push you out, then. It might take a while, but we won’t leave you here. I promise.”
Something in Cradily perked up at those last words. Her tentacles started their slow squirming again.
Kabutops pressed his broad, flat head up against the back of Cradily’s weighted bottom half, dug his scythes into the ground and began to push as hard as he could with the little energy he still had. Aerodactyl grabbed onto her head with his feet – she didn’t seem to mind – and started flapping his wings backwards in an attempt to pull her along. Beside Kabutops, Omanyte squirmed up to Cradily and pressed her shell valiantly against the sea lily’s body. Kabutops couldn’t imagine her efforts would be helping much, but he appreciated the gesture.
Bit by bit, they heaved Cradily across the ground towards one of the gaping holes in the wall of the Secret Base. It took an immense effort, but Theo would have done it, so Kabutops and the rest of them had to do it in his stead.
Finally they managed to push her all the way through the dimly lit gap, and suddenly they found themselves in the outside world. The sudden sight of trees and vegetation disoriented Kabutops – it was easy to forget that they were in a forest while they’d been inside the Secret Base. A faint light could be seen coming through the trees in one direction; dawn was approaching.
With a sigh of exhaustion, Kabutops let his legs give way beneath him. Letting go of Cradily, Aerodactyl half-landed, half-crashed on the scorched ground.
“So what now?” the pterosaur demanded, already pushing himself up and staring hungrily off into the trees. “The green human’s getting further away – we need to go after her…”
Seeing the extent of the burnt undergrowth around the Secret Base, Kabutops shook his head. “It’s not that simple,” he said, indicating the fire damage with one scythe. The area that had been blackened to a crisp formed a perfect circle – outside that, the vegetation was fresh and untouched. “This wasn’t a natural fire. Humans must have done this.” Kabutops only knew one group of humans that would have deliberately set fire to the Secret Base. “Those humans who were after Archopy… oh, no…”
His voice trailed off as he gazed unseeingly through the trees in horror. It was looking less and less likely that Theo had managed to escape.
Screeching, Aerodactyl rose into the air with a furious flap of his wings. “If they’ve hurt him again…” he growled, glaring at nothing in particular.
Omanyte looked worried. “They won’t, will they?” she asked, gazing up at Kabutops with innocent eyes. “He won’t let them catch him.”
“Oh, Omanyte,” Kabutops said quietly. “I wish that were true.”
She withdrew a little into her shell, her eyes wide. “It’s not?”
“Of course it’s not!” roared Aerodactyl, suddenly directly above Omanyte, bearing down on her with huge flaps of his wings. “Of course they’ll have caught him! He had no idea what he was doing and he’s useless in forests, so now they’ll have caught him and taken Archopy from him and they might… they might even have…” Breaking off before he finished that thought, he gave up flying and crashed to the ground, his furious voice growing more and more strained. “And there’s nothing we can do, because we have no idea where he is.” Before Kabutops could respond, he jerked his head away, not looking any of them in the eye.
Omanyte had disappeared completely into her shell, trembling. “That…” came her tiny, muffled voice from inside. “That isn’t… he couldn’t…”
Kabutops shot Aerodactyl an accusing glare before kneeling down beside Omanyte and tilting her shell up to peer into the opening. He couldn’t see anything but darkness within, but he tried regardless. “Don’t worry, Omanyte,” he said, as kindly as he could given the anxiety that was trying to creep into his voice. “Aerodactyl didn’t mean it; he’s just scared, like the rest of us.” He took a deep breath. “It’s true that our trainer’s probably been caught, but… but he’s going to be okay, because we’re going to make sure he’s okay.”
Her eyes appeared in the opening, shining with hope. “R-really?”
“I… Yes, we are,” Kabutops said, trying to silence the doubts at the back of his mind. Omanyte needed to believe that everything would work out.
“Then what are we waiting for?” growled Aerodactyl, eyeing Kabutops again.
“What?” he said. “But we… we can’t go now… I mean, we’re exhausted, for one thing, and we don’t even know where he is. We need to think things through so we don’t go blundering in… don’t we?” He looked between the others for support.
Seeing Cradily, he suddenly realised that she’d been very quiet since they’d left the Secret Base.
“We stay,” she said slowly, her voice wavering. She wasn’t quite looking anyone in the eye. “Master will find us here.”
“Cradily,” Kabutops said carefully, “you don’t really believe that he’d have managed to avoid being caught, do you?”
Her head twisted away from him, tentacles twitching uncomfortably. “Master will escape and come for us,” she insisted. “He has to.”
Aerodactyl hissed in frustration and rose from the ground again with erratic wingbeats. “Well, I’m not sitting around waiting for that to happen,” he said, making Cradily wince. “I’m going after him. Now.”
“Wait, Aerodactyl!” Kabutops protested. “You can’t just up and leave! We need to think things through, to work together…”
“You are not my leader!” Aerodactyl snapped, and with that he turned and shot off on a lopsided but determined flight away through the trees.
“But…” Kabutops was at a loss. “You don’t even know where he is!” he called out desperately, hoping that Aerodactyl would hear him and see sense.
“I don’t care!” came the screeched reply as the last sight of leathery wings disappeared into the gloomy forest.
Kabutops sighed and sat down heavily. He really, really wished Theo were here.
“Have to stay,” Cradily was muttering to herself, with tiny, jerking shakes of her head. “Can’t leave.”
It finally dawned on Kabutops why she was being so insistent. “Cradily…” he said, “are you talking about us, or yourself?”
The sea lily looked down at the ground, her usually writhing tentacles very still. There was no way Kabutops could realistically push her any further than this. However much she might have wanted to help Theo, she was anchored to the spot.
Kabutops was torn. Part of him wanted to go after Aerodactyl and stop him doing anything reckless. Part of him wanted to stay with Cradily so she wouldn’t be left alone. And then there was Omanyte, who needed someone to keep reassuring her that everything would be okay. This was impossible. How did Theo do this? What would he do, if it were him in this situation?
“Go,” Cradily said, quietly but firmly. “Master would go. If one of us was in trouble out there and he couldn’t recall me, Master would go anyway and come back for me after.” She suddenly looked directly at Kabutops, a hint of pleading in her plain yellow eye. “Come back for me after, won’t you?”
Kabutops stood, taken aback. “Are you sure?” he asked.
She nodded. “Master needs us. Needs you.”
“Okay, then,” Kabutops said. He nudged Omanyte’s shell; she’d already emerged from it and was looking up at him with worried eyes. “I’m going to find Aerodactyl, then we’re going to find our trainer and help him,” he told her. “Are you coming with me?”
“Yeah!” Omanyte squeaked, eager despite the nervousness in her voice.
Kabutops nodded encouragingly at her then turned back to Cradily. “Okay,” he said hesitantly. “You, uh… you keep an eye out here, then. We’ll come back for you once we’ve found him.”
“Or,” she said, her tentacles beginning to undulate just a little, “Master escapes and finds me, then we find you.”
Kabutops caught the glint in her eyes and half-smiled, even though they both knew how unlikely that was. “Yeah,” he said. “Or that. See you, Cradily.”
He began to walk off in the direction Aerodactyl had flown in, Omanyte rolling along beside him. As he took a last look back, he saw Cradily lowering her head sadly, curling her tentacles in around herself. Kabutops felt a pang of guilt for leaving her even though she’d said it was okay; she seemed so lonely already. But if he wanted to help Theo, he had to.
It occurred to Kabutops that Theo must have felt the same way about leaving him and the rest of his Pokémon in the Secret Base while he escaped with Archopy, only countless times worse. Kabutops sped up his walking despite the aching in his limbs. He really needed to find and help his trainer as soon as possible.
“How do we find Aerodactyl?” asked Omanyte.
“If I know him, he’ll have kept flying in a straight line,” Kabutops said. “It should be easy enough.”
Sure enough, it didn’t take long for them to notice a leathery grey shape sprawled in the undergrowth ahead of them. Kabutops hurried towards it in concern, but Aerodactyl was still conscious, at least. He was staring ruefully forwards, his wings splayed out around him.
“Are you okay?” Kabutops asked.
Aerodactyl pushed himself up from the ground as best he could. “Couldn’t… fly… any more,” he rasped, still staring ahead as if he could see Theo through the trees. “But I need to find him. I need to…”
“We all need to find him,” Kabutops said simply.
“Yeah,” Omanyte agreed. “We’re going to find Father and help him!”
Aerodactyl glanced at the two of them and then deflated, looking a little guilty. “You’re right,” he muttered. “Sorry, Omanyte, about back there. I didn’t mean to…” He broke off and went back to staring anxiously through the forest. “But how do we find him? We have no idea where he is,” he said, digging his claws into the ground in frustration.
“I don’t know,” Kabutops admitted, feeling like this task was becoming more impossible by the minute. “I suppose… I suppose we could try asking some wild Pokémon if they’ve seen anything?” He looked at the other two; neither of them objected. “Okay,” he said, nodding determinedly to try and muster up some confidence. “We’ll do that, then. We can work out what to do once we’ve found him when we get to that point. I don’t quite know how we’re going to do this, but we have to try.” He stood up and began leading Aerodactyl and Omanyte through the forest. “Come on.”
As she approached the Pokémon Centre through the trees of Fortree City, Vanessa was deep in thought. She’d been watching the flashing dot on her screen for several hours now, and one thing seemed clear – Archopy was headed back to MemorCorp. This in itself surprised her. The two trainers she’d encountered who had let slip about Archopy had given every impression that they were intending to catch it for themselves. Indeed, a quick check of her software showed that Archopy was now in the possession of the young man, one Theodore Harcliffe. So why were the two trainers taking it back to the company that had revived it? Had they been agents of the company all along? It didn’t seem likely.
Nonetheless, Vanessa reasoned as she neared the doors bearing the words ‘Welcome to the Pokémon Centre!’, already having a good idea of Archopy’s destination gave her a head start. MemorCorp was conveniently near a city, too; all she had to do now was secure a way of getting there herself. She’d recalled Joy for the time being so that this would go more smoothly; as much as Vanessa loved her Togetic, Joy did have a habit of chirping cheekily at inopportune moments.
Vanessa strode through the open doors of the Centre, heading straight for the counter, at which the only person in the building was standing. The silver-haired nurse was exactly the man she was looking for. Sylvester Martin, his name was. She’d had dealings with him before.
The man’s standard Pokémon-nurse smile of warmth faded as he saw her there. His eyes turned hard. “You,” he said. “I thought I told you last time you were here that ‘we hope to see you again’ doesn’t apply to you.”
Vanessa ignored his hostility and did her best to put on a charming smile. “Mr. Martin,” she said. “Or rather, Nurse Martin. I was wondering if you’d be interested in another little deal.”
His expression didn’t waver. “You know I’m not. Please, leave.”
“Oh, don’t worry, this wouldn’t be as big a deal as before,” she said. “Last time, I couldn’t help but notice you had an Alakazam. I was wondering if it would be so kind as to give me a lift to somewhere I need to go. That’s all.”
“That’s all?” A little of the coldness left the nurse’s eyes.
“Indeed,” Vanessa assured him. “Of course, as before, I will pay you as much as you –”
“No.” Nurse Martin shook his head, placing his hands firmly on the counter. “Not again. Look at me; I don’t need your money any more. If you want a lift from my Alakazam, there’s only one thing I want from you in return, Miss Swift. I want my Tyranitar back.”
Vanessa narrowed her eyes, mulling his offer over.
The nurse found a ‘Be Right Back’ sign from somewhere and put in on top of the counter. “Let’s talk about this outside, shall we?”
As promised, Chapter 32!
Unfortunately, this is a bit of an inconvenient chapter to be posting immediately after a massive hiatus; the writing kind of assumes you at least vaguely remember what's been going on recently. So, again, I recommend at least skimming Chapter 31 to get back up to speed, if you don't remember much.
Anyway, huge, huge apologies for the wait, and I hope you enjoy.
Chapter 32: Direction
Grudgingly, Carrie dropped her Poké Balls into the palm of the huge Bad Light member walking beside her through the nighttime forest. She really didn’t have much choice; with him and the man on her other side no doubt carrying full teams of six each, her five exhausted Pokémon wouldn’t have stood a chance.
“How did you even manage to find me?” she growled, directing her question at the third Bad Light member whom she could just about make out walking in front of her, his hands held nonchalantly behind his back. “You couldn’t possibly have known I was in that Secret Base.”
Andrew grinned as he looked back at her over his shoulder. “You’ve got one Vanessa Swift to thank for that,” he said. “After you mentioned her, I asked one of the guys to look into her background, which in his language apparently meant ‘hack into her laptop’. Turns out she’s running a program that shows her – and now us – exactly where that Master Ball is and whether or not it’s occupied. Convenient, eh?” His eyes twinkled slyly. “Aren’t you glad you told us about her now?”
Carrie ground her teeth in frustration. Both Vanessa and MemorCorp had been tracking her from a distance, had they? That explained why Velotus hadn’t spotted anyone tailing them last night. It also meant that Vanessa knew Archopy had been captured now and would probably be heading this way. Where was Vanessa, anyway? Carrie hadn’t seen her in what felt like ages.
“Surely it would have been simpler just to follow me directly anyway?” she asked bitterly.
Andrew shrugged and faced forward again. “More fun this way. Besides, aren’t you glad we stopped your little friend getting away? You two must have so much to catch up on.” There was an inordinate amount of glee in his voice at that last statement, something Carrie couldn’t help but feel apprehensive about.
Their trek through the forest had brought them to a somewhat flatter, more open area of the hill, where Carrie could make out through the darkness a row of small trucks built for carrying a dozen or so people in the back. Presumably this was how Bad Light had got here; clearly, it was also how she would be leaving here. Andrew led her past the nearest one, and the next nearest, seemingly arbitrarily choosing one further down the row with which to fling the doors to the back open with a dramatic flourish.
Carrie peered into the gloom; it was dark enough that all she could make out was two low benches on either side. A rough shove at her back from one of the other men prompted her to climb inside and sit on a bench, though not without scowling at the man in the process. Andrew jumped in behind her, shutting the doors with a clang and plunging them into further darkness. From the sounds and the vague shapes she could make out, it looked like Andrew had sat himself down right next to the doors and put his feet up on the opposite bench, forming a barrier between her and freedom with his legs. There didn’t seem much chance of Carrie escaping, then – not with her Pokémon in the hands of one of the other men whom she could hear getting into the front.
As the truck rumbled to life, faint streaks of light made their way in above and between the doors, presumably from the truck’s headlights, making it marginally easier to see. With a splutter, the vehicle began to move, juddering up and down across the hilly ground.
“I don’t suppose there’s any point asking where you’re taking me,” Carrie said.
Andrew perked up from the relaxed posture he’d shifted into. “Of course there is!” he said. “Thought you’d never ask. The Director wants you at MemorCorp.”
“What?” said Carrie. “Does she want to talk to me in person this time or something?”
“Nope,” Andrew replied. “I don’t think she really gives a damn about you any more now that she’s got Archopy. She just wants to keep a closer eye on you so you don’t do anything stupid like tell people her plans.” He gave a mock-frown. “Savage got all annoyed because she made it sound like she doesn’t trust us to keep you quiet out here. He wanted to try and accidentally kill you again, you know.” He grinned. “Still, I reckon it’ll be fine. I’m sure we can find some syringes containing something that isn’t water this time once we’re back at MemorCorp, don’t you think?”
Carrie gritted her teeth, repressing a frustrated groan. As long as they had her Grovyle and some of that evolution serum, she wouldn’t be able to do a thing. She hated the fact that a simple chemical gave them so much control over her.
Andrew just beamed.
Folding her arms huffily, Carrie stared at the cloth-covered roof of the truck. MemorCorp was somewhere on the outskirts of Petalburg City – halfway across Hoenn from Steel Hill. And Carrie’s only company on the journey was to be Andrew. Great.
On second thoughts, Carrie wasn’t entirely sure that they were alone in there. A sort of wheezing sound, like somebody’s laboured breathing, was coming from the opposite corner of the space. Squinting in that direction, she could make out the shape of a person huddled in the shadows now that her eyes were more accustomed to the near-darkness. With what seemed like a great effort, the person in question heaved themselves upright, shifting out of the dark as they did so, and Carrie saw Theo staring back at her through the gloom.
“You,” she hissed.
Theo gritted his teeth and didn’t respond. He couldn’t, Carrie realised; she could see him struggling to breathe, his sitting position stiff and awkward. It seemed he was paralysed – that would be the second time for him in about two days.
It occurred to Carrie that she ought to feel sorry for him, but she wasn’t about to start pitying the man who had tried to capture Archopy for his own selfish gain, who’d been planning to do so all along. Instead, she glared daggers at him across the truck’s interior. Theo jerked his head in what might have been a dismissive headshake and directed his pained gaze down at the floor.
With a way-too-wide grin, Andrew pulled something out of his pocket, reached towards Theo and sprayed the contents of a small bottle in his face. Theo coughed and spluttered and began to relax, his posture becoming gradually less stiff.
Carrie recalled the last time their captors had decided to ease Theo’s paralysis for no apparent reason and gave Andrew a quizzical look. “Okay, so I get why you did it the last time,” she said, “but why un-paralyse him this time? It’s not like we’re going to be talking to anyone important anytime soon.”
“No,” Andrew admitted, “but this would be no fun if only one of you could speak.” He said it as though he was pointing out something obvious.
Carrie stared, then shook her head dismissively and rounded on Theo. She opened her mouth to fire some kind of scathing comment at him, but he spoke first.
“I suppose you’re happy now.” Theo’s voice was laced with so much bitterness that it barely sounded like him. Accusing eyes stared out at Carrie from beneath his matted fringe.
“What?”
“I suppose you’re happy,” he repeated. “Archopy’s going back to MemorCorp to be put through hell again. But that’s okay, because it means her species comes back and you finally get to vindicate your silly little hatred for Sceptile.”
Carrie flinched. She’d never heard Theo be this venomous before, nor had he ever hit so uncomfortably close to home.
“After all, it’s not like you actually care about her wellbeing specifically, is it?” Theo went on. “She’s not your Pokémon. Why should you care?”
“She’s not yours either,” Carrie snapped back instantly. She really wished he’d stop labouring under the delusion that he somehow deserved to own Archopy.
“Excuse me?” he replied. “I dug up her fossil. I asked for her to be revived. She was caught with a ball which I threw. Whether you think I deserve her or not – which, by the way, has no bearing on anything – how in the world is she not mine?”
“If I could just chip in,” Andrew said, “a Pokémon’s trainer is always registered as the one who threw the ball, regardless of where the ball came from. So yes, Theo here does officially own Archopy now.” He grinned infuriatingly at Carrie. “Sorry, Grovyle-girl.”
Carrie scowled. It was almost plausible to believe that Andrew was lying for the sake of messing with her – except, now that he mentioned it, she remembered Sam saying the exact same thing a few days ago. Which meant that Archopy was technically Theo’s Pokémon now.
Damn it.
“That doesn’t change anything!” she snarled. “You had no right to just grab her without giving her a chance!”
“You have no right to just cart her off back to MemorCorp without giving her a chance, either,” Theo shot back, fixing her with a piercing glare. “Didn’t you say that she’d said no?”
“Well, yes, but…” Carrie broke off and frowned. “Wait, since when did Archopy being brought back to MemorCorp have anything to do with me?” She glared briefly at Andrew. “That’s down to his lot.”
“True,” Theo admitted, his voice dark and resentful, “but then why aren’t you complaining?”
“What? As if complaining would…”
Carrie stopped herself. Theo was right; she hadn’t objected once she’d found out Archopy was headed back to MemorCorp. Did that mean she was okay with it after all, despite it being against Archopy’s wishes? Could she just as easily have been the one to throw the Master Ball and hand it off to Andrew if Theo hadn’t got there first?
She shook her head savagely. “No, I’ll tell you why I’m not complaining any more. It’s because at least she hasn’t ended up with you.”
“Wha…?” It took Theo a second try to find the steel in his voice again. “What? In what way exactly would that have been worse for her than MemorCorp?”
“In the ‘you acted like a crazed, selfish madman back in the Secret Base’ way,” Carrie pointed out. “Trust me, Theo, you didn’t exactly look like the kind of guy Archopy would want to spend the rest of her life with. I mean, what sort of trainer leaves the rest of his Pokémon behind to run off with the one he’s just caught?”
“I had to do that,” said Theo a little too quickly. His eyes were hidden by the shadows for a moment. “I had no choice.” Abruptly he went back to staring accusingly at Carrie. “You gave me no choice! If you’d actually understood why I needed to do this, then I wouldn’t have had to stop you coming after me!”
A snickering sound had started up in the other corner of the truck. “Hang on, hang on,” Andrew said, looking between the two of them as if they were in on some big joke he was missing. “So Theo’s Pokémon were in that Secret Base?” He let out a cackle and turned to Carrie. “And that’s why it took you so long to get out even after Arcanine torched it?”
“Torched it?” came a hoarse whisper from Theo.
Andrew was still laughing to himself. “Oh, Carrie, why didn’t you tell me?” he giggled. “I could have got some of the guys to go in and grab them before we left. We needed more –”
“You leave them alone,” Theo hissed, his voice wavering slightly despite the force in it. He whipped around to Carrie, his fixed glare harsher than ever. “This is your fault,” he said. “If you could just get it, if you could even try to understand what goes on in other people’s heads instead of staying in your own little world…”
Carrie snorted. “Then what? I’d have just happily let you run away with Archopy? I don’t think so.”
Theo shook his head witheringly. “You really don’t get it,” he muttered.
“What exactly is there to get?” Carrie asked, staring. “You wanted Archopy, you somehow managed to convince yourself it was because you could ‘help’ her, and here we are.”
“I can help her!” he insisted, that I-am-in-the-right gleam in his eyes again for a moment, and then it fell. “I could have helped her, if that lot hadn’t…” He turned to glare darkly at Andrew.
The Bad Light member held up his hands in a placating gesture. “Hey, me and the guys are just doing our jobs here,” he said. “If you want to get all fiery at someone for opposing you on principle –” he indicated Carrie – “point yourself back at her.”
Theo’s glare didn’t let up. “You did your job by torching the Secret Base?”
Andrew shrugged. “Had to get her out of it somehow. Hey, I didn’t even know your Pokémon were in there. It was nothing personal.” He waved a hand towards Carrie. “Go on, go back to blaming her for forcing you to send them out in the first place.”
Theo stared between the two of them, seeming momentarily at a loss.
Carrie raised an eyebrow. “So apparently I ‘forced’ you to leave your Pokémon in there,” she said. “Because I couldn’t understand how you were going to help Archopy, or something. Well, let’s say I want to try and understand now: how exactly were you going to help Archopy? Honestly, I’m kind of curious here.”
“I… I was going to talk to her. To gain her trust.” Theo’s voice was a lot smaller and quieter than it had been moments ago. “Then I could help her get over those memories of hers.”
“And how was that going to work?” Carrie asked. “Even if you did somehow manage to gain her trust, which, let’s face it, is pretty impossible –” she noticed Theo flinch and not meet her eye at those words – “how exactly were you going to help her get over the memories? I mean, you don’t even have a way to understand her language. What on earth were you planning to do?”
“At least I was going to try!” Theo exclaimed, suddenly defensive again. “That’s more than I saw you offering to do, even though you do have a way to understand her.”
Carrie was thrown for a second, before she shook her head. “No, this is not about me – you just basically admitted that you had absolutely no idea what you were going to do to ‘help’ Archopy once you’d caught her. Are you still going to pretend you didn’t do this out of some kind of selfish greed?”
“I didn’t!” he insisted, a hint of pleading in his eyes. “You have to understand; I really did want to help her. I just…” He sighed, drooping. “I just don’t suppose I ever really thought I’d get that far.”
Carrie almost laughed. “Wait, what?” she said incredulously. “You didn’t even think you’d get that far, but you still went for it? If you knew this would be a gigantic failure, why…?”
“Someone had to try and help her,” Theo said, the desperate insistence in his voice beginning to sound like a broken record. “No-one else seemed to care – you were perfectly fine with her being carted back off to MemorCorp once you heard the Director’s wonderful plan –” he said those last words with a heavy dose of irony, and then jerked his head at Andrew – “and they clearly don’t give a damn about her. Who else was going to help her if not me?”
“Oh, stop acting like you’re the world’s only goody-two-shoes,” Carrie snapped irritably. Something suddenly occurred to her. “In fact, yeah, you’re really not. Whose fault is it that Archopy even has those memories? Who brought her fossil to MemorCorp in the first place?”
She smirked as the horrified realisation hit Theo.
There was a cackle from the opposite corner. “Ouch,” Andrew commented, giving Carrie a grin and a thumbs-up.
“No,” Theo murmured, staring down at the floor, shaking his head numbly. “I didn’t… I didn’t know they were going to do that to her. It’s not my fault.”
“Yeah, but it really wouldn’t have taken you that long to find out,” Andrew pointed out. “MemorCorp. Clue’s in the name.”
“I… it all went so fast.” Theo lifted his head to shift his pleading gaze between the two of them. “Milo had a new job, and I was too excited about discovering the fossil… I didn’t think to ask…”
“What you basically just said is that it was your fault,” Carrie said.
Theo grimaced and looked away, hiding his face in the shadows. “I didn’t mean to hurt her,” he mumbled, his voice small and pathetic. “You have to believe me. I would never mean to hurt her.”
Carrie smirked. “Oh, of course,” she said. “But Archopy isn’t the only Pokémon you completely didn’t mean to screw up, is she?”
Andrew’s eyes lit up at this. “She isn’t?”
“Armaldo.” Carrie gave Theo a scrutinising gaze. “You took his fossil to some place that forgot to put his brain in, am I right? And even though you’ve tried to ‘help’ him, that hasn’t exactly got very far over however long you’ve had him, has it?”
“No…” Theo lifted his head out of the shadows, a ghost of the fierce glare from before back in his eyes. “Leave Armaldo out of this. This has nothing to do with him.”
Andrew made an exaggerated coughing noise that sounded a lot like “Denial!”
Carrie glanced at him then back at Theo, a grin spreading across her face. “Wait, it does? You mean this does have something to do with Armaldo?” She laughed. “Oh, but of course! This has everything to do with Armaldo, doesn’t it?”
Theo winced, his face becoming half-hidden by darkness again.
“Yeah – you couldn’t fix Armaldo, so you thought that if you could fix Archopy instead, that would make up for it! I’m right, aren’t I?”
Theo shifted further into the shadows and said nothing.
Carrie gave a sly grin. “Sooo,” she said, “lemme just confirm this one more time. Are you still going to claim that when you threw the Master Ball at Archopy, you were doing it entirely for her sake?”
There was a long pause.
“I don’t know,” came Theo’s voice at last, all the fight utterly drained from it. “Yeah, you’re probably right. I probably am just a selfish madman.” This time, his bitterness was very much directed at himself. “So there you are. You win. Congratulations. I suppose you’re happy now.” He huddled further into his corner until she could barely see him at all through the shadows.
Carrie stared numbly at him. She’d imagined that she’d get some satisfaction out of making Theo stop pretending and admit everything was his fault, but the feeling just didn’t seem to want to come.
“So,” Andrew piped up from the other corner, his eyes twinkling with curiosity, “that Armaldo that Archie grabbed off him when he captured him doesn’t have a brain?”
“Oh, shut up,” Carrie muttered. “I don’t see why you were acting like you were on my side there.”
He frowned at her, looking genuinely puzzled. “I wasn’t.”
The ride continued on in silence. With nothing left to occupy her, Carrie’s thoughts drifted to the doubts that the argument with Theo had seeded in her mind. Would she really have ended up giving Archopy to MemorCorp against her will if Theo hadn’t thrown the ball first? Should she be trying to help Archopy get over her memories instead, considering that she did have a way to understand her?
Carrie shook her head in frustration. There was no point thinking about any of that. Things simply hadn’t happened that way, and that was the end of it.
But in the dark confines of the truck as they drew ever closer to MemorCorp, there really wasn’t that much else to think about.
After what felt like a long time but might have only been a few minutes, the shape in the shadows shifted. “My Pokémon,” Theo said, sounding so pitiful and broken that Carrie almost felt sorry for him until she reminded herself who this man was and shoved the feeling aside. “Were they okay?”
Carrie snorted. “Oh, yeah, first they had a huge battle against my Pokémon – mostly Grass-types, I should point out – and then the place got torched. I’m sure they’re fine.”
“But…” She caught a glimpse of the dull glint of Theo’s eyes as he looked at her from the shadows. “They will be okay. Won’t they?”
She shrugged. “How should I know? I got smoked out of the place by him,” she said, nodding at Andrew.
Andrew wasn’t contributing to this particular discussion. He merely grinned disconcertingly.
“And anyway,” Carrie went on, “we’re being taken back to MemorCorp. You’re not even going to be able to see them again for ages. So it’s not like it really matters right now, does it?”
“Of course it matters,” Theo mumbled sadly from the darkness. “It always matters.”
* * *
The first thing Kabutops became aware of as he regained consciousness was the smell of burnt vegetation. The next was that he still hurt – the terrible ache of the Grass energy that had seeped into him throughout the battle lingered throughout his exoskeleton, along with the stinging of burns, though that felt tiny by comparison. The pain was such that it took him a moment to clear his head. He wasn’t used to waking up injured; most of the time, his trainer would have –
His trainer. Everything that Theo had done came flooding back to Kabutops. At the forefront of it all was his order not to let Carrie escape and follow him no matter what happened. Kabutops looked frantically around the blackened interior of the Secret Base, but to no avail. The only others there were Aerodactyl, Omanyte and Cradily, all still unconscious and covered in scorch marks. Carrie and her Pokémon must have escaped in the confusion of the fire.
Kabutops hung his head. He and the others had let their trainer down.
He was worried about Theo. It wasn’t the fact that he’d caught Archopy – it went without saying that any Pokémon from a fossil Theo had dug up was his if he wanted – it was the way he’d gone about doing it. Kabutops had known his trainer his whole life, and he knew when Theo didn’t truly believe in something he was saying. If the man had complete conviction that he was right in capturing Archopy, then he wouldn’t have done it like this. He wouldn’t have gone behind Carrie’s back. He wouldn’t have run away and left his Pokémon behind to stop her following. He wouldn’t have sprung it on them all without any warning like this.
Kabutops wished that Theo had thought to talk to one of them about this beforehand, sometime when Carrie wasn’t around. If he’d just been able to get it off his chest, Kabutops felt sure that he wouldn’t have been so horribly conflicted about it all. They’d have reassured him that what he was doing was right.
Shaking his head sadly, Kabutops pushed himself to his feet. He needed to talk to the others.
Aerodactyl had seemingly already come around on his own; his eyes snapped open at the sound of Kabutops’ dragged steps. The pterodactyl pulled his feet under him and stretched his wings out stiffly. “She escaped, then,” he muttered ruefully.
Kabutops nodded mutely as he walked over to Omanyte and nudged her shell. After a few tries, her round eyes blinked from within the opening, and she squirmed her way out of hiding. “What do we do now?” she asked, glancing nervously around the empty Secret Base.
Not knowing the answer to that question, Kabutops tried to put it out of mind for now and focus on waking up Cradily – given her part-Grass typing, the fire must have hurt her the most. He tried poking one of her tentacles with the blunt part of his scythe. “Cradily,” he said. The tentacle twitched, but there was no other response. He poked it again, and then the one next to it. “Come on, Cradily, wake up. The green human escaped. We need to figure out what to do now.”
The tentacles began to undulate slowly, and finally one of her eyes opened a little, a yellow slit within the black groove on her face. “Tried to stop her,” she mumbled. “Couldn’t let her go after Master.” The eye closed again. “Failed.”
“So what do we do now?” came Aerodactyl’s voice from behind her. “Couldn’t we just go out there and find her before she gets to him?”
Kabutops shook his head. “I don’t think any of us are capable of chasing a human right now,” he said. “And we were out for a while – she might have already found him. Or…” He closed his eyes, not wanting to think of the other implications. “…someone else might have.”
“They won’t,” piped up Omanyte, sounding oddly cheery given the circumstances. “No-one will find him. Father can get away from anyone!”
Kabutops almost shot her a disbelieving look but dropped it and averted his gaze as he realised just how she could say that with such conviction. Omanyte was still young. She still utterly idolised Theo; in her eyes, he was invincible. She hadn’t yet realised that he was as fallible as any other being. The rest of them had been through that when they’d seen him struggle to come to terms with Anorith’s condition. But that had been before he’d dug Omanyte’s fossil up.
Kabutops grimaced inwardly. This was going to be tough for her.
“You say that, but what if he hasn’t got away?” Aerodactyl hissed, with a glare that made Omanyte shrink back into her shell. “We should go after the green human right now, never mind how tired we are.” He gave his wings a furious flap and promptly winced in pain.
“We stay here,” Cradily said forcefully. She heaved her head up from the ground with what looked like a huge effort. “Master promised to come back for us. Master keeps his promises. Even if…” Trailing off, she glanced away, her tentacles twitching in discomfort.
Omanyte squeaked in agreement. “He will!”
Aerodactyl growled under his breath but didn’t say anything. Kabutops found himself agreeing with the pterosaur’s sentiments. He wished he could have had Omanyte’s innocent belief that everything would automatically be all right, but he knew it would not be that simple.
“Okay,” he said, waving a scythe to try and get those thoughts out of his head and think logically. “Assuming he manages to get away from everyone who’s after him and sort things out with Archopy so he can come back for us, how will he know where to find us? We all know he’s not very good with forests.”
“Master promised,” Cradily insisted, staring down at the ground with fervent resolve. “Master would search forever until he found us.”
Kabutops had to agree with her there, but even so, he’d been there when they’d entered this Secret Base. The entrance was incredibly easy to overlook; he worried that Theo would struggle to find it again in a huge forest, even if he knew what he was looking for. It would have been bad enough when it was still intact – now that it’d been burned…
A horrifying thought struck Kabutops. He looked worriedly at the walls of the base. The vegetation had been blackened to a crisp, and there were gaping holes in some places – holes through which he couldn’t actually see the outside. Only a surreal kind of dim light made its way in through them, like starlight but without any stars.
“We definitely need to get out of here,” he said. He tried to sound urgent, but his voice just came out full of dread. “If we even can.”
“What does that mean?” hissed Aerodactyl.
“We’re in what humans call a Secret Base,” Kabutops explained. “It may sound strange, but even though the inside is this big, the outside of this place is just a small mound of grass with a hole in it. Except now, that mound of grass has been burned. I’m not sure anything can get in any more.”
“Master can’t… get in?” Cradily’s tentacles lost their usual rhythmic wiggle and became very still.
“Can we get out?” Aerodactyl asked, his eyes flicking towards the holes and the strange light coming through them.
“I really hope so,” Kabutops said, following his gaze, “because that’s the only way our trainer will ever be able to find us again.” He paused awkwardly. “That decides it, then. We have to leave here, at least. We’ll… work out what to do after that once we get out.”
He tried to ignore the glare Aerodactyl gave him out of the corner of his eye. Kabutops felt like he’d somehow become the unofficial leader of the group, but he wasn’t sure if he deserved the role. Had Theo been there, leading them all like he always did, he’d know exactly what to do. Without him, Kabutops was afraid that any decision he made would end up being the wrong one.
But at least he was sure that leaving the Secret Base was a good move, he told himself. That was a start. He warily began to approach one of the holes in the wall, Aerodactyl and Omanyte following behind him.
“Wait!”
It was Cradily. She hadn’t moved to follow – because she couldn’t.
“Can’t leave me…” she muttered feverishly. “I… I have to see Master again. Don’t leave me… please…”
Kabutops screwed his eyes shut, hating himself. For a moment he couldn’t even bring himself to turn around and face Cradily. She sounded quietly terrified of the thought of being alone in here forever. And he’d almost left her there. Theo would never have forgotten about her.
“Cradily…” He opened his eyes and turned to her. “I’m sorry. You’re right.” He walked back up to her, beckoning Omanyte and Aerodactyl to do the same. “We’ll have to push you out, then. It might take a while, but we won’t leave you here. I promise.”
Something in Cradily perked up at those last words. Her tentacles started their slow squirming again.
Kabutops pressed his broad, flat head up against the back of Cradily’s weighted bottom half, dug his scythes into the ground and began to push as hard as he could with the little energy he still had. Aerodactyl grabbed onto her head with his feet – she didn’t seem to mind – and started flapping his wings backwards in an attempt to pull her along. Beside Kabutops, Omanyte squirmed up to Cradily and pressed her shell valiantly against the sea lily’s body. Kabutops couldn’t imagine her efforts would be helping much, but he appreciated the gesture.
Bit by bit, they heaved Cradily across the ground towards one of the gaping holes in the wall of the Secret Base. It took an immense effort, but Theo would have done it, so Kabutops and the rest of them had to do it in his stead.
Finally they managed to push her all the way through the dimly lit gap, and suddenly they found themselves in the outside world. The sudden sight of trees and vegetation disoriented Kabutops – it was easy to forget that they were in a forest while they’d been inside the Secret Base. A faint light could be seen coming through the trees in one direction; dawn was approaching.
With a sigh of exhaustion, Kabutops let his legs give way beneath him. Letting go of Cradily, Aerodactyl half-landed, half-crashed on the scorched ground.
“So what now?” the pterosaur demanded, already pushing himself up and staring hungrily off into the trees. “The green human’s getting further away – we need to go after her…”
Seeing the extent of the burnt undergrowth around the Secret Base, Kabutops shook his head. “It’s not that simple,” he said, indicating the fire damage with one scythe. The area that had been blackened to a crisp formed a perfect circle – outside that, the vegetation was fresh and untouched. “This wasn’t a natural fire. Humans must have done this.” Kabutops only knew one group of humans that would have deliberately set fire to the Secret Base. “Those humans who were after Archopy… oh, no…”
His voice trailed off as he gazed unseeingly through the trees in horror. It was looking less and less likely that Theo had managed to escape.
Screeching, Aerodactyl rose into the air with a furious flap of his wings. “If they’ve hurt him again…” he growled, glaring at nothing in particular.
Omanyte looked worried. “They won’t, will they?” she asked, gazing up at Kabutops with innocent eyes. “He won’t let them catch him.”
“Oh, Omanyte,” Kabutops said quietly. “I wish that were true.”
She withdrew a little into her shell, her eyes wide. “It’s not?”
“Of course it’s not!” roared Aerodactyl, suddenly directly above Omanyte, bearing down on her with huge flaps of his wings. “Of course they’ll have caught him! He had no idea what he was doing and he’s useless in forests, so now they’ll have caught him and taken Archopy from him and they might… they might even have…” Breaking off before he finished that thought, he gave up flying and crashed to the ground, his furious voice growing more and more strained. “And there’s nothing we can do, because we have no idea where he is.” Before Kabutops could respond, he jerked his head away, not looking any of them in the eye.
Omanyte had disappeared completely into her shell, trembling. “That…” came her tiny, muffled voice from inside. “That isn’t… he couldn’t…”
Kabutops shot Aerodactyl an accusing glare before kneeling down beside Omanyte and tilting her shell up to peer into the opening. He couldn’t see anything but darkness within, but he tried regardless. “Don’t worry, Omanyte,” he said, as kindly as he could given the anxiety that was trying to creep into his voice. “Aerodactyl didn’t mean it; he’s just scared, like the rest of us.” He took a deep breath. “It’s true that our trainer’s probably been caught, but… but he’s going to be okay, because we’re going to make sure he’s okay.”
Her eyes appeared in the opening, shining with hope. “R-really?”
“I… Yes, we are,” Kabutops said, trying to silence the doubts at the back of his mind. Omanyte needed to believe that everything would work out.
“Then what are we waiting for?” growled Aerodactyl, eyeing Kabutops again.
“What?” he said. “But we… we can’t go now… I mean, we’re exhausted, for one thing, and we don’t even know where he is. We need to think things through so we don’t go blundering in… don’t we?” He looked between the others for support.
Seeing Cradily, he suddenly realised that she’d been very quiet since they’d left the Secret Base.
“We stay,” she said slowly, her voice wavering. She wasn’t quite looking anyone in the eye. “Master will find us here.”
“Cradily,” Kabutops said carefully, “you don’t really believe that he’d have managed to avoid being caught, do you?”
Her head twisted away from him, tentacles twitching uncomfortably. “Master will escape and come for us,” she insisted. “He has to.”
Aerodactyl hissed in frustration and rose from the ground again with erratic wingbeats. “Well, I’m not sitting around waiting for that to happen,” he said, making Cradily wince. “I’m going after him. Now.”
“Wait, Aerodactyl!” Kabutops protested. “You can’t just up and leave! We need to think things through, to work together…”
“You are not my leader!” Aerodactyl snapped, and with that he turned and shot off on a lopsided but determined flight away through the trees.
“But…” Kabutops was at a loss. “You don’t even know where he is!” he called out desperately, hoping that Aerodactyl would hear him and see sense.
“I don’t care!” came the screeched reply as the last sight of leathery wings disappeared into the gloomy forest.
Kabutops sighed and sat down heavily. He really, really wished Theo were here.
“Have to stay,” Cradily was muttering to herself, with tiny, jerking shakes of her head. “Can’t leave.”
It finally dawned on Kabutops why she was being so insistent. “Cradily…” he said, “are you talking about us, or yourself?”
The sea lily looked down at the ground, her usually writhing tentacles very still. There was no way Kabutops could realistically push her any further than this. However much she might have wanted to help Theo, she was anchored to the spot.
Kabutops was torn. Part of him wanted to go after Aerodactyl and stop him doing anything reckless. Part of him wanted to stay with Cradily so she wouldn’t be left alone. And then there was Omanyte, who needed someone to keep reassuring her that everything would be okay. This was impossible. How did Theo do this? What would he do, if it were him in this situation?
“Go,” Cradily said, quietly but firmly. “Master would go. If one of us was in trouble out there and he couldn’t recall me, Master would go anyway and come back for me after.” She suddenly looked directly at Kabutops, a hint of pleading in her plain yellow eye. “Come back for me after, won’t you?”
Kabutops stood, taken aback. “Are you sure?” he asked.
She nodded. “Master needs us. Needs you.”
“Okay, then,” Kabutops said. He nudged Omanyte’s shell; she’d already emerged from it and was looking up at him with worried eyes. “I’m going to find Aerodactyl, then we’re going to find our trainer and help him,” he told her. “Are you coming with me?”
“Yeah!” Omanyte squeaked, eager despite the nervousness in her voice.
Kabutops nodded encouragingly at her then turned back to Cradily. “Okay,” he said hesitantly. “You, uh… you keep an eye out here, then. We’ll come back for you once we’ve found him.”
“Or,” she said, her tentacles beginning to undulate just a little, “Master escapes and finds me, then we find you.”
Kabutops caught the glint in her eyes and half-smiled, even though they both knew how unlikely that was. “Yeah,” he said. “Or that. See you, Cradily.”
He began to walk off in the direction Aerodactyl had flown in, Omanyte rolling along beside him. As he took a last look back, he saw Cradily lowering her head sadly, curling her tentacles in around herself. Kabutops felt a pang of guilt for leaving her even though she’d said it was okay; she seemed so lonely already. But if he wanted to help Theo, he had to.
It occurred to Kabutops that Theo must have felt the same way about leaving him and the rest of his Pokémon in the Secret Base while he escaped with Archopy, only countless times worse. Kabutops sped up his walking despite the aching in his limbs. He really needed to find and help his trainer as soon as possible.
“How do we find Aerodactyl?” asked Omanyte.
“If I know him, he’ll have kept flying in a straight line,” Kabutops said. “It should be easy enough.”
Sure enough, it didn’t take long for them to notice a leathery grey shape sprawled in the undergrowth ahead of them. Kabutops hurried towards it in concern, but Aerodactyl was still conscious, at least. He was staring ruefully forwards, his wings splayed out around him.
“Are you okay?” Kabutops asked.
Aerodactyl pushed himself up from the ground as best he could. “Couldn’t… fly… any more,” he rasped, still staring ahead as if he could see Theo through the trees. “But I need to find him. I need to…”
“We all need to find him,” Kabutops said simply.
“Yeah,” Omanyte agreed. “We’re going to find Father and help him!”
Aerodactyl glanced at the two of them and then deflated, looking a little guilty. “You’re right,” he muttered. “Sorry, Omanyte, about back there. I didn’t mean to…” He broke off and went back to staring anxiously through the forest. “But how do we find him? We have no idea where he is,” he said, digging his claws into the ground in frustration.
“I don’t know,” Kabutops admitted, feeling like this task was becoming more impossible by the minute. “I suppose… I suppose we could try asking some wild Pokémon if they’ve seen anything?” He looked at the other two; neither of them objected. “Okay,” he said, nodding determinedly to try and muster up some confidence. “We’ll do that, then. We can work out what to do once we’ve found him when we get to that point. I don’t quite know how we’re going to do this, but we have to try.” He stood up and began leading Aerodactyl and Omanyte through the forest. “Come on.”
* * *
As she approached the Pokémon Centre through the trees of Fortree City, Vanessa was deep in thought. She’d been watching the flashing dot on her screen for several hours now, and one thing seemed clear – Archopy was headed back to MemorCorp. This in itself surprised her. The two trainers she’d encountered who had let slip about Archopy had given every impression that they were intending to catch it for themselves. Indeed, a quick check of her software showed that Archopy was now in the possession of the young man, one Theodore Harcliffe. So why were the two trainers taking it back to the company that had revived it? Had they been agents of the company all along? It didn’t seem likely.
Nonetheless, Vanessa reasoned as she neared the doors bearing the words ‘Welcome to the Pokémon Centre!’, already having a good idea of Archopy’s destination gave her a head start. MemorCorp was conveniently near a city, too; all she had to do now was secure a way of getting there herself. She’d recalled Joy for the time being so that this would go more smoothly; as much as Vanessa loved her Togetic, Joy did have a habit of chirping cheekily at inopportune moments.
Vanessa strode through the open doors of the Centre, heading straight for the counter, at which the only person in the building was standing. The silver-haired nurse was exactly the man she was looking for. Sylvester Martin, his name was. She’d had dealings with him before.
The man’s standard Pokémon-nurse smile of warmth faded as he saw her there. His eyes turned hard. “You,” he said. “I thought I told you last time you were here that ‘we hope to see you again’ doesn’t apply to you.”
Vanessa ignored his hostility and did her best to put on a charming smile. “Mr. Martin,” she said. “Or rather, Nurse Martin. I was wondering if you’d be interested in another little deal.”
His expression didn’t waver. “You know I’m not. Please, leave.”
“Oh, don’t worry, this wouldn’t be as big a deal as before,” she said. “Last time, I couldn’t help but notice you had an Alakazam. I was wondering if it would be so kind as to give me a lift to somewhere I need to go. That’s all.”
“That’s all?” A little of the coldness left the nurse’s eyes.
“Indeed,” Vanessa assured him. “Of course, as before, I will pay you as much as you –”
“No.” Nurse Martin shook his head, placing his hands firmly on the counter. “Not again. Look at me; I don’t need your money any more. If you want a lift from my Alakazam, there’s only one thing I want from you in return, Miss Swift. I want my Tyranitar back.”
Vanessa narrowed her eyes, mulling his offer over.
The nurse found a ‘Be Right Back’ sign from somewhere and put in on top of the counter. “Let’s talk about this outside, shall we?”
* * *
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