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We Have Diamonds in Our Eyes

EmberGryphon

Meowth Fanatic <3
We Have Diamonds in Our Eyes

Rated: Eeeh. I don't think it's R-worthy. I'll go with PG-15-ish, for mild violence, frank sexual reference/humor, possible mild sexual content, profanity, and drug reference.

Disclaimer: Specific characters are mine, unless otherwise specified. Critter concepts and the general concept of pokemon? Not mine. Although I did create pokegypsies, so there, sucka.

A/N: Feel free to skip over this part. If there's one thing you learn from this fanfic, it'll be that I talk waaay to much in author's notes. xD

I hate posting my fanfics to forums. Actually, I hate posting new fics anywhere. x3 So forgive my indecision, but I'm always worried about how these new ones will be recieved. ^^() I tend to have a weird writing style where my sentences run on for a paragraph and things that make perfect sense to me make no sense to anyone else. And so I get a wee bit anxious.

Y’all might be wondering, “But Ember, why gypsies?” Because pirates and ninjas are too overdone and I didn’t want to do Jedis. So there.

--

Prologue/Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five

--

Prologue

--

It floated.

It wasn’t really asleep, because the ocean didn’t let it sleep. The currents jettying around it, the waves crashing above it, the motion of pokemon passing by, jarred it from its rest. And it wasn’t really awake, because the monotony lulled its senses into a weary, lax sort of state of concious. The ocean was alive, it was moving, but it was sedate, it was calm, it was almost playful. It didn’t sleep and it wasn’t active. But it meditated. It felt every inch of the ocean, expanded its mind into every crevice of every rock. It felt every eddy and every wave, because it wasn’t caught in the currents, it was the current. The impossible pull of the ocean, hammering against the land. Not the ocean itself, perhaps, but part of the ocean, the heart of the ocean, the strength of the ocean.

Every few years, it breathed, and its exhale rippled across the surface of the sea.

It was not conciously aware of waking until it finally found itself, not in the push-and-pull of the sea-patterns and riptides, but in a smaller, finite, material form, condensed on the floor of the ocean.

For a moment, it did not know why it had awoken. It was dimly aware of the suppressing darkness of the bottom of the sea, the crushing weight of the water, and a strange feeling that it was at once trapped somewhere very small and very dark, and simultaneously floating in someplace intimidatingly larger than its corporeal self. Deep-sea pokemon, mostly kinds still unknown to trainers on land, skirted past, casting their own eerie, pale glow that sometimes stretched down to cast the sand and stones in pale, conflicting, ill-defined shadow.

And then the ocean trembled.

Every molecule, every plankton, every shaft of light fighting to penetrate the darkness of the deepest crevices. Every stone, and every grain of sand, shook for a moment like the itchy skin of some giant creature. Lugia, the deep-sea guardian of the ocean, the heart of the sea, knew immediately why it had awoken.

Kyogre was angry.

The ocean was in danger.

Another shudder shot through the sea, and Lugia threw its head back, sucked in a lungful of chillingly cold, taintedly salty ocean water, and screamed.

Then it spread its wings and shot, eyes narrowed, for the surface, for the sky, and for its own, more private, battle against the threat to its home and its loyalty.

--

It slept in its mountain, for the land does not move, and the wind is nothing but a whisper in its ear. It felt the coursing of the lava through the earth, a pathway that mimicked the blood that pounds its way through its body- or maybe the creature’s body mimicked the lava. At some point, the order of the correlation had been lost, even in its ancient memory.

On occassion, it dreamed, of fire or of rain, and of a building burning and powerful creatures running, tireless, across the land. And when it dreamed, sometimes it rained, and sometimes it stormed, and sometimes volcanoes exploded in a shower of molten rock- and sometimes it just dreamed, and those dreams were private, and held in its heart.

It might have been sleeping, but it woke immediately, with a jolt of horror, when the sky and the earth trembled under its feet.

The magma inside the earth roiled, surged, settled, and surged again, like a caged animal, panicking but unable to escape. It threatened to break through, it threatened to seep up into the air and swallow the world away. Its fire ignited something in Ho-oh’s mind.

Groudon was angry.

The land was in danger.

Ho-oh spread its rainbow wings and shrieked, hearing the answering scream somewhere far away, under the ocean, but on a frequency perfectly resonate with its own call.

And Ho-oh launched itself into the sky.

---
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Chapter One

The Gypsy Caravan

--

Frey’s fingers trembled just a little, but his eyes narrowed slightly in concentration and, to his immense satisfaction, the little gold coin flashing between each digit, turning and catching the light through the window as it dipped and tricked from one side of his hand into the other, didn’t falter on its path. He fingers waved back and forth, keeping the coin from wavering or falling from his grasp while he moved it across the path of his knuckles. He was about to make his third and final pass with it, and was using his thumb to flip it back the other way, when the rear wheels of the wagon caught hard on a rock and the wagon flew up and landed with a thunk on the road. The coin clattered to the ground, along with five or six books, one pokeball, his desktop lamp and a small picture frame, the last of which shattered as it hit the ground. A second later, a smaller bump knocked another book off the desk in the corner of the single-room wagon.

Frey felt an irrational flash of anger at nothing in particular, and took a second to force himself to cool off before he got up from the edge of his bed, where he’d been sitting with his legs crossed, practicing his sleight-of-hand. He was frustrated that he couldn’t just play at his coin tricks, and that of course the rest of the caravan was way too noisy to read, and it was still another half hour or so until they finally arrived at Ecruteak, ready to barter off cheap fortune-telling tricks and magic acts during the upcoming festival. He was bored out of his mind, upset that he couldn’t keep anything nice on this wagon without it breaking, and he had a bad feeling about the canival in and of itself- all of which mingled together into a general gray paste of irrational but heady irritibility.

With his luck, the whole city would be flooded an hour’s time into the party. He glanced outside, but the sun was beating down strong; hopefully it would be this nice tomorrow. He couldn’t shake off the nagging feeling that it would rain.

With a regretful sigh, Frey tossed the coin back into his little bag of ‘tricks’ and piled the books back up on his desk. When he gathered the picture frame together, he carefully pulled the photo out, slid it into a desk drawer, and tossed the broken frame out his open window, into the woods passing by on either side of the road. The broken glass he swept to the side of the wagon with his foot, then pushed it out into the path after he heaved open the side door to his little home. Then, because it was a nice day and he didn’t have anything else to do, he jumped lightly out of the wagon and slid the door back closed, keeping up with the slowly-rolling wagon easily.

“So you finally decide, come out and see the sun, Frey,” Madame Charletruese said, grinning over at him from where she was sitting, on the back of her own wagon-home, knitting kneedles clacking together in their rhythmic pattern and green wool yarn pulling taunt and looping together, keeping up the pattern unconciously as she talked. Madame Charletruese was an older woman, in her mid-forties, her ash-colored hair pulled up on a bun on top of her head, her face respectably lined, her green eyes somewhat dulled with the day-to-day labor- labor of love, maybe, but labor nonetheless- of raising her seven children- the youngest still three, the oldest now past twenty. She had two kids around sixteen, Frey’s age; both girls, one thirteen and one a few months older than Frey. When they had been younger, they would play together often enough; now, the girls were learning to knit and dance and tell fortunes, and Frey had his own chores to do- and he was trying to raise Loki up besides that, and take care of the wagon and Aegir on his own. The girls were still his friends, and he talked to them and often at carnivals, if they weren’t off giggling at and flirting with and exploiting strange boys, they’d walk around together, but they weren’t as close as they used to be, and, sometimes, they looked like strangers to him.

Frey himself was a slightly too-skinny kid with a thin, pale face, reddish-blonde hair that sat messily on top of his head and hung down in tangled ringlets to his earlobes, grey-green eyes with thick eyelashes, and long, almost gangly limbs. His skin was mostly clear, with a splash of freckles on either cheek and trailing down his neck, and sometimes an embarrassing bout of achne on his forehead. He dressed, like most of the gypsies, in multiple layers of light, translucent clothing, silk and chiffon; silk scarves, trailing sleeves, heavy jewelry, and belled shoes. Frey usually dressed in green- it made his eyes look a little brighter and his hair look a little more blonde. Unlike some of the gypsies- although by no means all- the bells on his shoes were clipped on for easy removal. Sometimes it paid better to not jingle every time you moved.

Madame Charletreuse dressed in grey, yellow, pink, and pretty much every other color imaginable. After the seventh child, it no longer mattered so much whether or not your outfit brought out your eyes. “I worry about you sometimes, Frey,” she said, frowning when she found a knot in the basket of yarn she was using.

He managed the best impression of a genial smile he could muster. “Don’t be.”

Without playing around the topic, she pressed on, “You still angry at your mother?”

Of course he was still angry. “Not really,” he lied, jumping up onto the wagon to sit beside her rather than walking alongside. Aegir, the Tauros that pulled his own wagon, never even seemed to notice if he was inside or outside his home; the bull pokemon just kept pulling without complaint. Madame Charletruese’s Rapidash snorted at the extra weight, hesitated for a moment, then kept moving forward.

Madame Charletruese kept going as if the lie was too feeble to acknowledge. “What she did was terrible, boy, but the world takes all sorts, and if you get desperate enough- and with a kid and no man in her life, she was as desperate as they come, you know- Team Rocket looks awfully inviting.”

Frey just shrugged, but with the chubby, middle-aged, amazingly wise woman’s pale gaze locked onto the side of his face, it was impossible not to rise to the bait. “She could have told me what she was doing.” He tried not to sound sullen, but the resentment crept into his voice nevertheless.

“Boy, you were ten. No mother drags her ten-year-old son into that sorta thing. Would’ve put you at risk- tell me now, when the police asked you what you knew about it and you said not-a-thing, well, Naisha and me, we was happiest we’ve ever been. We was scared, scared you were in on it from the get-go, but your mother, she was a better woman than that.”

Naisha, the matriarch of the little band of gypsies, and Madame Charletreuse had been giving Frey this sort of talk for almost two years, now, and Frey had never let himself be absolved. What his mother had done was unforgivable. But he let them talk, because it made them feel better to think they were helping him out. “If you think so.”

“And I do. Look at that.” She leaned out a little and pointed at a wild Murkrow, perched on the highest branch of an old oak tree. It was late in autumn and most of the branches were bare, the few lingering leaves too sparse that high up to give much cover to the bird. “Murkrow passes on the left, fortune’s ahead. I think it’ll be a good festival.”

“I think it’s going to rain. I had a dream last night,” he plowed forward, before she could scold him for his pessimism. He paused for a second, collecting all the fragments he could remember, and finding to his surprise there wasn’t much he could recollect. “It was about the ocean. It was about Lugia. It woke up.” Beyond that, he couldn’t remember very much beyond a myriad of emotion that he’d felt, in the dream, when Lugia opened its eyes- or maybe, that Lugia had felt. Anger. Horror. Drive. He wasn’t sure how to put it in words, so he just said, “It was angry, and it....” What had it done then? There wasn’t much he could remember except the dark scenery of the dream, the blacks and blues, and Lugia’s frantic fury. “...it did something. And Ho-oh woke up, too, and it was angry.” Feeling stupid for having brought it up, he shrugged it off. “Probably just thinking too much about the thing in Hoenn.”

Madame Charletruese chuckled. “Probably. It was an amazing thing, no?- and wonderful that that Hoenn girl gets a day of festivals just for her, she did something amazing, didn’t she? Awfully brave, to go wake up Rayquaza when everyone else was just trying not to be bowled over by Groudon and Kyogre.”

Frey just shrugged; he felt a little uneasy to hear the woman talk about it, because the fact of the matter was, he hadn’t thought about the war between Groudon and Kyogre recently, or really at all. Johto had barely gotten the tail end of the weather effects and hadn’t been in any real danger at all, unlike Hoenn. “I’m just glad it’s over,” he said, suddenly emphatic. “And that it happened over there.”

Madame Charletruese laughed loudly, startling her Rapidash. “I think we all are,” she said, and dropped her knitting in her lap with a certain air of finality. “I’m going to make lunch for the kids, honey, but feel free to come over to talk any time you want.” She stood up, snatched her half-finished scarf off her seat and hopped off the back of her wagon, half-trotting to get around to the side-entrance into the inside room. Her wagon was much bigger than Frey’s, but it still got extremely crowded in there, with eight people. The beds were crushed into the single room beside the stove and oven, along with whatever other odds-and-ends the family had gathered up.

Like Frey’s mother, Madame Charletreuse was unsure about which vague memory of a man had fathered which child. The traveling, cramped, often smelly, usually poor life of a gypsy discouraged most anyone from permanant relations with anyone in the life, so most of the women and men in the caravan were single and got loved on the road. Naisha had a husband, but they only got along for a few weeks every six months and then tended to revert to sleeping in seperate wagons, and bickering over the head of their only kid, a sardonic eight-year-old named Tucker. The rest of the gypsies tended to regard sleeping with fellow members of their caravan something equatible to incest- most of them had known each other their whole lives and were close as siblings. All the women in the caravan (except Madame Charletruese’s oldest daughter, a nine-teen year old who’d only just gotten to the point where she could be called a woman, but it was only a matter of time, the more gossiping of the gypsies clucked) had at least one kid, and all of them except Naisha raised them alone, with the help of the caravan. The two single men in the caravan might have had children, but never saw them, if they did, and didn’t let it bother them.

Leaving the mother alone to make breakfast for her children- who were probably all running ahead of the caravan, as they usually did, or practicing their tricks at the back of the train- Frey jogged to the head wagon at the front of the line. Naisha’s wagon was the first one on the road, her twin Rapidash, both with silver flame flecked through their mane instead of the normal red and making a statement the moment the caravan rolled into a town, pulling it proudly down the road. Naisha herself, a stately grey woman with her pale hair trapped in an iron-link net, sat at the front, guiding the entire train- the other pokemon pulling the other wagons (two wagons pulled each by single Rapidash behind Naisha’s, the second of which was Madame Charletruese’s, then Frey’s wagon pulled by Aegir the Tauros, a bigger one than Frey’s pulled by two Tauros, and a small one pulled by two Ponyta) would follow Naisha’s wagon until they found their way to the town they were driving for. Beside her was her Jynx, a weathered pokemon almost as old as Naisha herself, whose psychic powers made up most of Naisha’s fortune-telling ‘talent’.

“Mrs. Naisha?” Respectfully, Frey waited for her to smile and wave to him before he climbed up onto the front platform of her wagon.

“Hello, Frey,” she said, and smirked when Jynx made a pleasant sound and smiled wide. The caravan’s pokemon liked Frey, which was heartening in the worst of times.

Frey settled himself so he sat beside the bench on the front platform instead of on it, his legs dangling between the rigging for the Rapidash, his head positioned strategically lower than Naisha’s. As the official leader of the caravan and the dominant personality in her marriage and her family, that sort of gesture was important to the older woman. “Do you know when we’ll get to Ercruteak?” he asked, watching the Rapidash bobbing their heads as they walked.

“Shouldn’t be more than a couple hours,” was the older woman’s response, with a shrug. “Getting impatient?” A knowing smile flowered for an instant on her face, and she flicked the Rapidash’s reins across their backs with a quiet, husky word of encouragement. The horses picked up the pace, and Naisha laughed when the left wheel of her wagon caught on a rock going considerably faster than normal, throwing her three inches off her seat. Frey couldn’t stop the smile. For all her arrogance and forced unapprochibility, there were times of pure, unadulterated charisma that made Naisha impossible to dislike, and that was a large part of what made her a brilliant leader.

She kept urging the Rapidash for another few minutes, until one of the other gypsies from the back wagon yelled that her Ponyta couldn’t keep up, which was when Naisha, laughing throatily, reined the Rapidash in. She turned to Frey with an almost appologetic smile, her eyes glittering. “Give it a few hours.”

He smirked, and said, “Alright,” with a hint of laughter in his voice. With a quick wave, he slid from the wagon, jogging forward a few steps to pat one of the Rapidash on its pale flank. “Thanks, Mrs. Naisha.”

He let Naisha’s wagon roll past him, then the two Rapidash, and jogged over to visit with Aegir. The Tauros nuzzled him on the shirt as he trotted beside his trainer, but seemed mostly pretty antsy in his heavy rigging. “You’re as bored as I am, aren’t you, Aegir?” Frey asked, combing his fingers through Aegir’s thick, tangled mane. The Tauros sighed through flared nostrils. He spent a lot of his time in the harness, and when he wasn’t pulling the wagon he was mostly in his pokeball while Frey played gypsy for crowds and sometimes played at less honest ploys, but at times, when neither of them were working, Aegir and Loki, Frey’s two pokemon, were trained to battle. Aegir, who Frey’d known for the last ten years of his life, had been the beast of burden for Frey’s mother before Frey had adopted him, when his mother was arrested for associations with Team Rocket. He had the raw, brute strength to take on most opponents, and a blind trust for the human who commanded him. Loki, Frey’s second pokemon, wasn’t quite as physically upstanding. He’d gotten the Meowth egg from his mother for his twelth birthday, and had, in the past four years, raised it up to Persian, but somehow the undying loyalty Aegir, and in fact most pokemon, felt for their trainers, never quite made it into Loki’s neural complex. The Persian was snidely independant, intolerant of most other people beside Frey, and sometimes of Frey, too, (which was why he spent a good amount of time, when they were traveling with the caravan, in his pokeball), and ridiculously finicky where food was concerned. Loki knew moves like Toxic, and Confuse Ray, and used physical attacks only when special moves had worn an opponent down to nothing already.

Both Aegir and Loki liked battling, but Frey wasn’t stupid enough to think he could drop out of the caravan and become a pokemon trainer. His monsters might be good, but he’d seen gym battles, and, worse, League battles, and knew that as a trainer, he didn’t have anything like what it took to be that good. He had fun, he even won every now and then, but he couldn’t do anything like that. To win at the Pokemon League, you had to be skilled, intimately aware of your pokemon’s strengths and weaknesses, and of their attacks, effects, and natural talents; just as knowlegable about your opponents, good at judgement calls and aware of what your opponent was likely to do, what would be wise to do, what your opponent might do just because you wouldn’t be able to predict it and, sometimes, it didn’t hurt to be a little bit psychic.

Frey checked his watch, and sighed. These few hours were taking days to pass.

When he got tired of walking, he went back into his wagon and watched the trees pass by through the window. It seemed like a very long time before a muted cheer ran though the caravan, and the entire train picked up the pace a little. Frey poked his head out, and saw the sparse skyline that marked Ecruteak City, straight ahead. He gave the ritual, if belated, cry, and jumped out of his wagon to meet the city head-on.

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Comments and critique are greatly appreciated! ^_^
--Ember
 
Last edited:

Godslayer

Well-Known Member
Wow, I've never actualy wanted to read a fic before- as in, I've never been compelled to read on. Now all I can ask for is a new chapter, because this was excellent.
 

EmberGryphon

Meowth Fanatic <3
Wow, I've never actualy wanted to read a fic before- as in, I've never been compelled to read on. Now all I can ask for is a new chapter, because this was excellent.

Wow, thank you! ^_^
 

EmberGryphon

Meowth Fanatic <3
Here's the second chapter! Sorry it's so long. x_X I didn't notice that until I took it out of the document to run spell-check on it. ^^()

Chapter Two

The Carnival

--

They slept in their wagons rather than paying for rooms in the Pokemon Center- which were free for licensed trainers but pretty expensive for anyone else. Frey got his pokemon’s feed ready, then let Loki out of his pokeball- the large, sleek Persian, with subtle tan points on his face, paws and tail and the rich, dark-red jewel set into his forehead, contrasting beautifully with both Frey’s outfit and Loki’s own green chiffon scarf tied around his neck and belled bracelets on his ankles, immediately settled down and started licking at the base of his tail, as if trying to rid his coat of any dirt that might have been in the pokeball. The bull pokemon got a bucket of standard livestock-build pokefeed, mixed with poffin grains and a few lum berries; Loki got a can of Spoiled Persian brand Homestyle pokefeed with two pecha berries for garnish.

As always, Aegir drained his water bucket twice- the few breaks the caravan took were never enough to keep the pokemon comfortably rested and watered- and then settled down into half-sleep while Frey went over him with the brush, cleaning out the sweat-stained knots and trail-burrs in his mane. Then Aegir was allowed to rest in his pokeball, while Loki, a slow eater at the best of times, continued to enjoy his meal. Keeping an eye on his sometimes bad-tempered Persian, Frey oiled Aegir’s rigging and put it away neatly in the back of his wagon, then rinsed out the Tauros’s feed and water buckets, and stacked them up beside the rigging. He threw the can from Loki’s pokefeed into his trash bag- already filled to almost bursting since it’d been a couple days since they’d left Goldenrod, and ready to be tossed into an Ecruteak trash can whenever he had time.

Loki finished with his meal and started cleaning off his whiskers and face. “You want to practice some before we go on, tomorrow, Loki?” Frey asked, grabbing his Persian’s bowl and cleaning it out to put it beside Aegir’s dishes. In a couple hours, the caravan members were going out to eat cheap pokemon-center stock food, but first the gypsies’ pokemon had to be tended to.

“Purr,” the Persian said, speculatively, then nodded. Loki might have been bitter-tempered at times, but he was still a good partner, and never had refused to fight battles or play tricks with Frey.

From inside a closet not quite deep enough to stand in, beside his bed in the wagon, Frey grabbed three red plastic rings- one five inches in diameter, one sixteen inches, and one twenty-seven inches. He started juggling them, focusing on the size of each one as it came down, so he knew where it would be when he caught it. After a few passes, they were regularly hitting the same height, so he called to Loki, who had been prancing circles around him, the bells on his ankles jingling brightly. The highest ring was some nine feet in the air, but Loki circled a dozen feet away from his trainer, trotted forward, and sprang, catching the five-inch ring in his mouth. While the Persian dropped it on the ground and circled the requisite distance away again, Frey readjusted his rhythm to only two rings, and then signaled again. Loki, jingling all the way, ran forward again, leaped up, and caught the sixteen-inch ring in his mouth. This one was clumsy to carry, so Loki tossed it in the air and lurched forward so the plastic ring settled neatly down on his neck, while Frey tossed the single ring up and down with one hand. Then the Persian backed away again, ran forward for the third time, and jumped through the largest ring.

It looked more impressive when they did it for real.

They practiced coin flipping, more juggling tricks, and the simplest jumping-through-hoops and toss-and-catch tricks they did when they were waiting for a crowd to gather. When they’d run through the whole routine, Frey grinned and patted the Persian on the head. “Good job, Loki. I think we’re ready.”

Loki purred, then pulled away from the caresses, and flopped down on his side, waiting to be brushed. The Persian wasn’t dirty, but Frey groomed him anyway, taking a little extra time to make sure there was no dirt or dandruff in the soft, often itchy spots behind Loki’s ears.

He’d just finished when Scarlet, Madame Charletruese’s sixteen-year-old daughter, poked her head around the side of Frey’s wagon. “Hey, there! You ready to go t’ dinner?”

Scarlet was a curly red-head with green eyes- much brighter than Frey’s- tan, clear skin, and a killer body with a criminal record. Frey knew that she knew she was pretty, and knew she used it, to just short of the extent where she could be legitimately called a *****, and felt all the protective distrust of any brother when he thought about it. They’d been friends since they were little, and once Frey had thought they should be more than friends. They’d play-acted at getting married a couple of times, usually at Scarlet’s insistence. Now they were absolutely nothing more than somewhat distant childhood playmates.

Frey rubbed at the loose skin around Loki’s hackles and was rewarded with a quiet purr. “You gonna be fine, Loki?”

“Purrrrsian,” was the languid response, and the cat nodded once. Frey called him back into his pokeball, and ran over to his wagon to grab Aegir, too. He slipped both of them into the pocket of his shirt and then jogged over to where Scarlet was waiting patiently, one curl of hair dangling in front of her face.

“Looking forward to tomorrow?” Scarlet asked, grinning openly at him. “I’ve been training with Sleek and Shot all afternoon. I’m doing one act with just them, and two acts with Teal and Jazz and their pokemon. And then I get to enjoy the fair.” Sleek and Shot were Scarlet’s Eevee. They each wore red ribbons tied into their manes to match their trainer’s red layered dress and scarves. Teal was Scarlet’s seven-year-old brother, already an accomplished acrobat; his only pokemon was a Farfetch’d named Whisk. Jazz (officially Jasmine, named after the greenish color and also the Gym Leader) was Scarlet’s thirteen-year-old sister, and Frey’s other friend; the two sisters were closer than twins. Jazz had a Meditite, named Desert, who she was trying enthusiastically to evolve.

“Sounds like fun. If I get a break during the day, maybe I’ll come watch you.” Scarlet never had to work full days- Madame Charletruese might have had her hands full with children, but all but the youngest worked, so they never needed extra money. Frey, on the other hand, usually worked full days, even if all his day wasn’t spent preforming.

--

Frey woke up with the sun the next day. The festival was still setting up, so he spent some time feeding Loki and Aegir, cleaning his and Loki’s scarves and oiling their bells, letting Aegir run some while he groomed the Persian, then finally recalling both pokemon and doing a couple warm-up exercises. Only when all of that was taken care of did he eat a quick breakfast at Madame Charletruese’s wagon.

“Good luck today, honey,” she told him, putting a sign that said “Tarot Card Readings” up at the door to her wagon, and letting her Butterfree, Hope, sit contentedly on top. “Goin’ to be a big crowd, I hear.”

“Good to hear that,” Frey muttered, waving as he left her home. He’d been in a restless mood today; it was good to hear that he might rake in some money here if nothing else. The festival was starting up; already, throngs of people were walking from one stand to another, poking around at homemade crafts and watching musicians, with Perrapu or Jigglypuff sitting beside or on top of them, playing flutes or singing. Not wanting to steal their thunder, Frey walked a little while, looking for a nice, secluded spot that could still get enough attention, then, when he’d found a nook to call his own and dropped down his supplies, set out his black hat for pokedollars to be tossed into.

He started with coin tricks; tossing, vanishing, seeming to pull them out of no where or from people’s ears or people’s hair. Then he juggled; pokeballs at first, and then he invited people to chuck whatever they were holding at him, and changed what he was juggling for whatever people threw to him- dropping his original three pokeballs as he caught sticks, acorns, a soda bottle, two shoes and an empty paper cup. After he was done, he tossed the shoes back to their owners and proclaimed loudly, in his crowd-pleasing voice, that this marked the last time he ever did that trick.

He said that every time he did that trick.

He had a small but respectable crowd, now, and decided to see if he could use the little tricks to draw a couple extra before getting into the big ones. He pulled three pokeballs out of his shirt pockets and started juggling them again, asking the crowd loudly to please not throw anything at him at this time. When he’d done five or so passes, he caught two of the pokeballs and let the third fall, stepping back as Loki popped out. Seeing the Persian dressed up in his scarf and bells set the crowd off, and Loki, arrogant as always, preened briefly in the applause.

“It’s all you, Loki,” Frey murmured to the cat, and grabbed double handfuls of plastic rings. This trick was easy for Frey and looked pretty simple from the outside, but Loki had to work to get the hang of it. Frey took one ring and tossed it high into the air; Loki ran for it and leaped through- and none too soon, because Frey was already throwing the next ones, turning ninety degrees and throwing the next as soon as he’d thrown the first. Loki hit the ground, turned without slowing and leaped through the second, then hit the ground, turned, leaped through the third, and then the fourth, and then the fifth. Each successive ring went higher, and finally, Frey paused and held the two last rings at his sides, while Loki circled around to a good distance away. Frey held on for a second while Loki started forward, then threw both rings at once, higher than all the rest had gone, and Loki soared, high enough that everyone in the crowd had to tilt their heads back to watch him, through both without even nicking either one.

The crowd cheered, and the Persian hit the ground hard, a self-satisfied grin marking his proud feline face.

Frey spread his arms. “Ladies and gentlemen, Loki the Persian!” The somewhat larger crowd applauded for him, and Loki preened. Frey had already grabbed three more empty pokeballs and were juggling them while Loki waited, resting from his last effort and surveying the crowd. Frey smiled to himself to see the Persian’s pale yellow eyes land at last on a middle-aged man; a somewhat overweight, almost entirely bald gentleman to the front of the crowd, his arms crossed over his thirty-five-year-old Weedle-Paras-Absol Fraternity shirt. He’d been thinking maybe that was their goose, too; he was glad to see signs that Loki agreed.

The crowd seemed to be a mingling of all sorts- the overweight man was flanked on either side by grinning, young trainers, while two older folks watched with their arms around each other, wearing the wry smiles of people who’ve already seen anything you have to show them. To the side, lingering just away from the front of the crowd, stood a large man with wild red hair and a huge, orange-brown fur cloak. He caught Frey’s eye mostly because of the mask- a strange, leather-looking contraption that looked like some unholy cross between a Blaziken and an Absol, tied onto the man’s face.

Not that it mattered. The crowd was supposed to be watching him, not the other way around. “You want to know the most annoying thing about raising a Persian?” Frey asked the crowd, giving a small nod to Loki and receiving a half-lidded smirk in return.

The Persian moved, slightly, back, and his eyes glowed a sudden bright yellow.

“He’s an arrogant little *******, and he’s picky as Hell- but mostly, it’s because he’s a Thief.” And then he was juggling two pokeballs, and the third was laying by Loki’s feet.

No one said anything- it had happened fast enough that no one had seen it, even if they hadn’t even blinked. Some people missed the transition entirely; those were filled in by impressed whispers from their peers. The man in the mask moved back a step or two.

“If I’m missing anything- an extra sock, or whatever- I know Loki took it.” The Persian’s eyes glowed again, and this time people paying close enough attention saw his shadow, first circle back on itself, then flash over to where Frey was juggling the two remaining pokeballs. The second one vanished; instead of feeling the hard, round surface hit his palm, Frey felt a soft, flat, leathery impact, and tilted his hand so Loki’s gift slid off his palm and down his sleeve. Then he caught the final pokeball, and held it up for everyone to see. The other two were laying by Loki’s feet.

As fast as he could, Frey dropped the ball into pillowcase he kept in his pocket, then, showing everyone that there was, in fact, still something inside the pillowcase, he grabbed a tin box, like the old-school lunch boxes, and dropped the pillowcase in there. He latched the lunchbox, shook it so everyone could hear what was inside rattling, then gave it to a member of the audience to open.

The young man undid the latch, pulled out the pillowcase and, at Frey’s urging, showed it to the crowd. There was nothing there, and there were three pokeballs by Loki’s feet.

As Frey well knew, the pokeball had never made it into the tin box.

“We have two more tricks for you,” Frey told the crowd as they all applauded Loki. He pulled his first prop out; a two-foot-long straight sword. “The first one is pretty straight-forward. As you can see...” and here he turned and stabbed a tree with the point of the blade; the sword stuck into the wood about two inches. “This is not a collapsible blade. It is a real, true-to-word sword. Now, this act looks pretty tough, but it’s really,” and here he dipped his voice into a confidential stage-whisper, as if telling them all some great secret, “the easiest trick I’m doing here. The only trick to swallowing swords,” and here he positioned the sharp tip at the end of his tongue and looked up at his hand around the hilt, “is to not think too much about it.”

He slid the blade down over his tongue and into his throat, holding very still and letting his throat expand around the metal. When his lips hit the pommel, he held his arms, hands empty, straight out to his sides, and leaned back, bending at the waist so his back was parallel to the ground. Loki trotted up and jumped on his chest- he was really much heavier than he looked- and curled his tail around the hilt of the blade, showing the crowd that the sword wasn’t held to the side of Frey’s face.

The crowd applauded and Loki jumped off Frey’s chest, letting his trainer straighten up and pull out the blade. For a second, he pretended he couldn’t get it out, then, when the crowd obviously wasn’t fooled, slid it easily back out of his throat, smiling genially as the crowd managed a general snicker. Loki’s eyes were glowing yellow when Frey glanced at him, but the sword remained in the human’s hand.

“Last trick!” Frey yelled, and was somewhat gratified by the moans of disappointment. “And for the record not thinking about it is not really the only trick to swallowing swords, so let’s keep the lawyers out of it.” About two-thirds of the crowd laughed, some weaker than others, but Frey didn’t really pay attention; this wasn’t a comedy act anyway. From the pile of his equipment, he grabbed the three plastic rings, small, medium and large. Jingling all the way, Loki trotted circles around him, while he started to juggle the rings. Like during practice, the Persian leaped up to catch the smallest, slipped the medium ring around his neck, and jumped through the largest. The applause was warm enough, but Frey held up his hand anyway.

“That wasn’t much of a final trick, was it?” he asked, catching the largest ring as it came down. “Should we make it more interesting?”

Most of the audience yelled out agreement. Loki slipped the medium-sized ring off his neck, caught it in his mouth and tossed it to Frey; the human leaned down and grabbed the smallest.

“Okay, Loki, let’s make this a little.... hotter.” He started over; the Persian paced around him, then caught the smallest ring in his mouth. When he dropped it, he picked up a bottle of dark liquid from their pile of equipment and tossed it to Frey, who seamlessly started to juggle the two larger rings and the bottle. When Loki caught the middle ring, Frey caught the largest in one hand and started tossing it up and down with that hand while he used the other to catch the bottle, pop out the cork, and take a deep mouthful. The dark fluid was slimy and burned against his mouth; he took special care not to swallow any. He dropped the empty bottle onto the ground and fished a charizard lighter from his shirt pocket. Loki started trotting forward, pale yellow eyes focused on the largest ring.

Tossing the final ring as high as he could, Frey snapped open the lighter and sprayed the liquid through the flame and into the air after it. The flammable fluid flared in a cloud of fire towards the plastic ring which, covered in a very thin layer of flammable resin, caught and flamed. Loki surged forward and flew through the air, leaping neatly through the ring of fire, and hitting the ground lightly and singe-free while the plastic ring, resin layer already burned away, hit the dust behind him, too hot to handle at the moment, but otherwise none the worse for wear.

The crowd erupted.

“Thank you all,” Frey told them, waving jauntily as they filed away, a couple checking their maps to see where the Kimono dance girls would be preforming at three. There was a small pile of pokedollars in the hat he’d left out, plus another hundred and fifty from the wallet Loki had slipped him during his Thief act, and seventy-five in the wallet the Persian had stolen while Frey had been swallowing swords. He had packed up his equipment and started hauling it back to his wagon for safekeeping while he took his lunch break when he realized Loki was holding something he hadn’t even realized the Persian had taken.

It was a feather, but Frey didn’t think Loki had been up to anything fiendish because anything that had shed a feather that big was bound to be a big bite for the Persian to swallow. The tip was deep, royal purple, that faded to crystal-colored blue, inching into a spectrum of different greens, brightening into a vivid yellow, which burned into orange and finally, at the base, crimson red. It was a little more than six inches long, and dangled out of Loki’s mouth awkwardly. Frey reached out and the classy cat spat it onto his hand, letting the gypsy inspect the array of colors.

“It doesn’t look painted,” Frey mused out loud, running his fingers down the length. “It’s pretty, though; good catch, Loki. Could be valuable.” The Persian smirked at the praise and paced after Frey, hissing at a little kid who’d come too close to stepping on his tail, and snarling cruelly to dissuade a four-year-old from petting the kitty.

The rest of the day was similarly lucrative. Frey bumped into a couple people, apologized submissively, and slid whatever had been in their pockets into his own. He gave the empty wallets to separate vendors, telling each of them that he’d found them lying on the ground around their stand, and so if someone asked it was here, and got praised twice for his good citizenship. Loki had opted to return to his pokeball for a quick nap while Frey filched his extra spending money and bought lunch, then let the Persian out to eat. While they were setting up for their second act of the day, a girl with a violin and a Skitty whose fur color perfectly matched the pink bow in the trainer’s hair told Frey she’d seen their act earlier, and asked if she could play while they were preforming, to draw more people in. Usually, Frey didn’t like that, but he’d done well enough today that he didn’t mind, and she played surprisingly well; their acts melded almost fluidly, with only a couple snags here and there, and he didn’t mind at all giving her half of what had appeared in his hat at the end of it.

The carnival was almost over by the time he’d packed up from his second act, so instead of trying to ply the crowds, Frey decided to just enjoy the fun. A small parade lurched through the crowds, with huge Groudon and Kyogre costumes looming almost twice the height of the girl playing May, who marched alongside a rather poorly-rendered Rayquaza suit. Sitting on a fence and eating homemade turkey sandwiches, two flute players good-naturedly argued about whose newly-composed song better captured May’s heroic plight. Two female belly-dancers and a Medicham danced wildly as it got steadily darker, using torches and tame Vulpix to light the show, and add an extra bit of danger to the routine, while the Kimono girls danced three acts in one day, on their own stage. A huge crowd gathered around them, sometimes silently watching and appreciating as their dancing called for, but more often cheering, jeering, and screaming out cat-calls and wolf-whistles. Loki, who had been walking around with Frey for a little while, stopped to stare lecherously at the Espeon, and Frey had to recall him to keep him from making an uncouth move when the dance was over.

At one point, the ground trembled. A young woman shrieked as the earth rumbled under her feet, and a handful of ultraballs tumbled from the pyramid you had to knock down to win a Pikachu doll in one of the game stands. It was a tiny tremor, though, and over in less than a minute. The woman who had screamed laughed awkwardly, embarrassed.

No one was in the mood to battle, today, so Frey didn’t get to train any- but there was a nice show to wrap the festival up, which reenacted May’s heroic climb up to Rayquaza’s peak, and Rayquaza’s own impressive battle against Groudon and Kyogre. Frey watched them with his arms crossed over his chest, wondering how one got an actual acting job. The rainbow feather ticked his elbow.

After a second, the feeling registered on Frey and he looked down in some surprise at the feather he held between his fore and middle fingers in his right hand. Why had he brought that along? He thought he’d left it in the wagon, with the rest of his stuff.

“Wake up, Rayquaza, Guardian of the endless sky,” the actress playing May was singing. Her voice really was amazing, and they’d actually made her ascent into the Sky Tower awfully epic and realistic, even if Frey doubted there had really been that much... charge between the real Rayquaza and the real May. The dragon costume’s ham-sized claw gently reached out and touched May’s face in its sleep. Also, he doubted either of them had been singing. “Creature of the years gone by. Come down, to us. Come down, and save us all....”

Rayquaza’s plastic eyes glowed suddenly with cheap LED pinpoints; the monster was awake. His claws lifted May’s face so their ‘eyes’ were ‘locked,’ and Rayquaza picked up on May’s little song, his voice falsely deep. “...It’s been centuries, since I came to be, since my feet have hit the land or sea....”

The feather was getting hot. It was awfully distracting, and Frey’s bad feeling, which he thought had dispelled the day before when he’d talked to Madame Charletruese, was getting stronger. What was more, he wasn’t the only one. A few people in the crowd were looking nervous or complaining about the heat, a couple with a young child was helping her to their car, explaining to their friends that she suddenly felt very nauseous, and on stage, ‘May’ had skipped over one of her lines where she was explaining to the Gym leader at Dewford what had transpired as they all watched Kyogre and Groudon being smashed down by Rayquaza. Blushing, she redid half her song, but she still looked awkward, and unsure.

In the thick of the crowd, Frey caught sight of Scarlet and Jazz, sitting on a wooden fence beside a guy Frey had seen walking around the festival. “It’s getting later, it’s getting darker, you wouldn’t think it would be getting hotter,” Scarlet was complaining.

Kyogre lurched back into the ocean and Groudon vanished into the ground; where, exactly, Rayquaza vanished to, no one seemed to know. The rainbow feather was painful to hold on to, but every time Frey thought he’d dropped it, he’d feel it burning his fingers again. He wasn’t sure why that didn’t bother him more. May was staring into the sky, her mourning apparent. “You’re gone, Rayquaza, median of the land and sea.... you’re gone, Rayquaza, you’ve left from me. How can I feel this way, this torn apart, to see you free.... when everything is how... it ought.... to be....”

And, on that note, the world broke apart.

It started shaking, lightly at first, then, two or three seconds after it started, more fiercely; the earth trembled, baulked, tossed, like a creature shivering in its bones. More than one person screamed; Frey felt his feet fall out from under him and his shoulder hit the trampled grass and slick mud with a thunk. Rolling onto his stomach, he managed to get up to his knees, but he didn’t try to stand; the earthquake was distorting his sense of balance. He felt a little ill- a mixture of the shaking, tossing, double-vision-inducing tremors and the sudden heavy, heady heat that sank into him and latched on. After a second, he realized the heat didn’t come from the air- it came from the earth; now that he was this close to the ground, the temperature was overwhelming. He couldn’t tell whether anyone was still screaming; the rocks and dirt grinding together overpowered all human sounds.

Then, one single scream echoed out over all other noise, and a blast of color erupted from the East. Frey looked up, and wished he hadn’t; the light burned holes in his eyes and closing them barely helped; spectrums of color danced behind his eyelids, except one splotch of negative space in the perfect shape of some sort of giant bird.

The earth split inches to the right of Frey’s palm, and the dirt crumbled under his weight, rocks and clumps of earth tumbling into the rising magma beneath. Swearing, Frey found the grounding, energy and inspiration to roll to the side, jump to his feet and stagger away from the fissures. Around him, the crowds of people were seeing the cracks in the earth and doing the same thing; grabbing for small children or shoving people towards the lava in their haste to save themselves. Frey felt a hard shove from someone more concerned with getting away than good karma, and took the anonymous festival-lover’s lead, running, shoving, and scrambling through the crowds. It was complete and utter pandemonium, chaotic and selfish, and now the general undercurrent of hysterical screaming was finally loud enough to drown out the low, throaty snarl coming from the earth. Frey ran for what seemed like an hour and was probably a good half a minute and barely managed to move twelve feet from where he’d started.

In the air, hovering in the sky, the light bird- it had to be, it couldn’t be Ho-oh- screamed again, its anger reverberating down Frey’s spine, its rage digging furrows into the earth. The ground shook hard again; the stage made a sound like an axe against wood amplified a hundred times as it collapsed like a house of cards, and trees fell like sleet down against the crumbling dirt. The upped magnitude sent Frey to his knees again, and the few larger men and women with better balance than he trampled him in their hurry to escape.

All this time, Ho-oh kept screaming.

Frey dug through his pocket, snatched up Aegir’s pokeball, and let the Tauros out with a muffled cry. The bull pokemon easily shoved his own path through the seething humanity and across the treacherous ground, sidling beside his master with a protective snort. Clambering to his feet, Frey lost his left shoe in a widening crack and let the magma take it, jumping up onto Aegir’s back without worrying about it. “We have to get out of here, boy,” he whispered, raggedly, although he hoped on the inside that Aegir had figured that out for himself.

The Tauros snorted, tossed its head, and charged; his hooves lightly hitting the mud, surefootedly avoiding weak spots in the ground and jumping easily over larger fissures.

Frey dropped the rainbow feather on the ground, and wasn’t surprised to find it in his other hand.

The pokemon center was rubble. The mart was half-collapsed, the houses were in shambles. The north wall of the Ecruteak dance theater had collapsed inward, and the roof was crumbling away. Aegir fled west, towards Route 118, his mouth slightly foaming in fear, and Frey, his lungs burning with the heavy taste of the smoke that rose in silver clouds, his ears ringing with screaming rocks and human voices, his eyes shut tightly against the ripped-and-gutted earth, scrambling citizens, flaring birds and blazing magma, didn’t see what was happening to anyone else.
 

EmberGryphon

Meowth Fanatic <3
Chapter Three

The Rocket Conspiracy

Night fell hard in Cianwood; overtop the streetlights and the square lighted windows, the Staryu twinkled like a second black sky filled with stars. And at the moment, there was no one watching them except one person who was not in the mood to appreciate natural beauty. “Seriously, Intern,” Annie snarled into her diglett-shaped walk-talkie. “You have ten seconds to finish with the code and get over here. My legs are cramping up and I think someone on the street saw me moving!”

Four stories down and safely inside, Gene “Vice” Davidson, Rocket Intern, jammed the red button on his own radio in and growled, “Then don’t move,” into the receiver. He regretted the words as soon as they were out of his mouth- after all, Annie was higher-ranked than he was and he didn’t have any right to talk to her that way- but he was frustrated by the security the Cianwood Gym’s computer system had. Luckily, he’d already managed to re-write the code that would alert the police to someone typing in the wrong password more than five times in a row, so he and Annie wouldn’t have to worry about unexpected guests, but turning off the security system in and of itself was frustrating.

He was only inside the Gym at all because he’d slipped in earlier, telling some of the trainers that he was challenging the leader, but turning down their demands to battle. He’d been forced to take on one of the trainers, whose twin Machokes had beaten up Flight, Vice’s Tyrogue, but had been crushed by Sin’s Psybeam attacks. Now Sin was exhausted and he only had Fury to protect him if he was caught in the Gym control room- locks picked courtesy of Sin again, whose lack of finesse sometimes got in the way of such delicate tasks, but who this time just smashed the whole mechanism in. The door didn’t close all the way anymore, but it didn’t really matter at the moment.

Annie’s voice was distorted by the basic technology, but it was clear she was ticked off at him. She wasn’t always this short-tempered and rarely this outright mean, but given the situation, Vice didn’t hold it so much against her. “Your ten seconds are up, Vice.”

“I’ve almost got it,” he responded, informing the courteous computer that yes, he did want to delete that command, and yes, he was sure. The computer buzzed for a second as it roiled over this new information, and then he slipped into the system.

And just in time. The radio buzzed and Annie hissed, “I was trying to talk to you just now, Vice. Did you hear me just now?”

“Just now?” He paused for a second to tell the computer that yes, he was aware that the command would wipe out the security systems for the gym and yes, he was just fine with that. “What did you say?”

“I said you ought to have had it half an hour ago and goddammit, Vice, I was on the wrong frequency. Someone heard me, Vice. I was on the wrong frequency.”

Vice snorted, then shut down the computer. Annie was always a little bit neurotic during this sort of mission- not that, at her current position, Vice blamed her too much. “You couldn’t have given up the entire mission in one sentence, Annie, and the security’s down anyway. I’m coming up there now.”

“I said that everyone knows the new Masterball prototype is here and if anyone sees me they’ll know why we’re here.” She sounded extremely ****** off, as if he had made her say something like that.

Vice swore under his breath. “You said that? Okay.” Panicking wasn’t going to help anyone; there probably wasn’t anything to panic over. “So maybe you could have given the entire mission away in one sentence.” He exhaled and calmed down. What were the chances the whole job was shot? Slim-to-none. “You probably weren’t on any two-way frequency, Annie, so don’t worry about it. You just added a bit of white noise. We’ll get in, get out, and no one will know the difference.” He took the stairs up to the fourth floor of the gym, careful not to touch the walls or the stairwell, but no longer worried about the cameras or laser-sensors, and jogged over to the window where Annie braced herself carefully on the ledge, her shoulder pressed against the panes. Her knees were digging into the stone landing and it was easy to see how her legs could be cramped. Vice looked around and snatched up a leaf of paper from a stack of forms on a nearby table- they seemed to be in some kind of office, probably Chuck’s; as a member of the League he had a voting voice on championships and new Gym Leaders and like all Gym Leaders got an office of his own in his gym. He used the form like a glove to open the window, then stuffed it in his pocket, leaving no fingerprints on anything anyone might find. Annie wriggled through the window like a snake, unconcerned as her legs thrashed in the empty space four floors above the ground and more worried about not leaving identifiable markings on the walls or window than about falling to her death.

“Vice” Davidson, Rocket Intern, was pulling for the fact that there would be too many different fingerprints on the computer keyboard to identify one set. If not, well; his arrest wouldn’t make too much of a dent in Team Rocket’s finite might.

“Alright,” Annie said, nodding to him. “Good work, Intern. Get Sin to let you down to the street; I’ll get down to the basement, grab the prototype, and get the hell out.”

“Sounds good,” Vice told her, and let her help him slide, feet first, onto the ledge without touching anything. He wasn’t like her; he didn’t take the transition from having something solid under his feet to having a long drop in front of him well, and he avoided looking down for fear that he’d fall in the inevitable bout of vertigo. Better get it over with quickly. He dropped Sin’s pokeball down onto the street below, watching it fall and fall, then closed his eyes before he would see it hitting the ground and letting the Girafarig out. His fingers nervously played over the soft, pliable edge on the feather he wore on a string around his neck; he couldn’t see the color in the dark, but he knew the silver curves by heart.

“Gir?” Sin asked, looking up at her trainer, who kept his eyes squeezed shut in preparation of what he had to do. Sin had been through this a lot, and knew what to do; sitting on her haunches, she waited for a long moment while Vice gathered his nerves. Like every time it came down to this, he had one wrenching moment where he didn’t think he honestly had the balls to do it- then he slid off the ledge and dropped into the nothingness below him.

He’d fallen two stories before he felt something solid and soft around him, and was lifted two feet up before settling down, gently as a leaf. Cushioned completely by Sin’s will, he landed on his knees on the ground and waited for his heart to slow down.

Damn it all, he hated heights.

“Girafa? Giira?” Sin inched close, the mouth on her tail clucking and snapping. Vice forced his head to clear out a little and stood up, patting Sin on the head, between the horns, as he did so.

“Yeah, you did good, hon,” he told her, scratching behind one ear. Sin purred, then let herself be recalled, vanishing back into her pokeball. It was slightly chilly even down here in Cianwood, and Vice, dressed only in the thin cotton Team Rocket Intern uniform, folded his arms over his chest and tucked his bare hands into his armpits. At least he had the solid ground under his feet again. “The worst part is over,” he muttered to himself. “At least it can’t get any worse.”

Six years in Team Rocket and most people have Murphy’s Law memorized; the wise ones never, ever say those seven words that tempt fate more than a pair of calibers in a Ninetails’s den. The eternally optimistic Vice, however, had been arrested eight times, shot twice, gotten drugged out of his mind and kidnaped for two weeks by the Neo Team Rocket and had never, ever learned to keep a low karma profile.

He wasn’t stupid, though, and he wasn’t surprised to hear the sirens.

“Annie, you hear me? The police are on their way.”

Annie had a talent for creative profanities, and managed to go on for some time. “I’m getting out,” she growled when she was done. “**** the mission.” Then the radio went dead.

Vice bolted for an alley, a crevice between the Gym and the building next to it, and squeezed between the bricks while the sirens drew closer. Three or four cars- he couldn’t count them at the angle he was at- pulled to a stop in front of the Gym, and a handful of cops sauntered over, clutching their handguns, looking, at this distance, way too cocksure to not be scared, uncertain. You never knew, dealing with Rockets. They had to know what they were dealing with- they’d probably either picked up Annie’s confessions on their own radios, or had someone call in panic.

He was standing there, trying not to breathe, his back pressed against the cold brick behind it, staring at the shifting, uncertain forms of the authority figures, when his radio sparked to life. The nearest two cops stiffened.

“I can’t get out, Intern. Make a distraction.”

Normally he wouldn’t take well to that sort of command, but Annie had either thought it out well or lucked out, this time. Maybe she had planned it that way, but a couple men were already staring at the alley; one was inching closer. They were about to find him anyway.

So he was already a distraction. Intentional or not, she’d trapped him without much of a choice for self-preservation.

Without responding to Annie, he snatched up his radio and threw it, hard, at the street- a tactic which distracted the cops for about a tenth of a second, which was almost enough time for Vice to regret not thinking further ahead before moving. Then he shoved himself out of the claustrophobic alley and pounded down the street as fast as his legs could take him.

“Rogers! Davis! Get him!” For a heartening second, Vice thought they were talking to other cops; then he heard the snarls. ****. Growlithe.

Puppy pokemon, maybe, but Vice had played with these dark-street footraces against Growlithe for enough times to know that puppy or no, they were damn fast. Two Ember attacks almost knocked Vice down and he knew the Growlithe were about to mow him down even if the human element of the police force wasn’t hounding down his *** as fast as he could run.

Swearing under his breath, he surged down an abandoned-looking side-street and found himself in a dead end, with his back up against a building’s wall, staring down the throats of two Growlithe and two cops. Dammit! His face hardened against the instinct to raise his hands over his head and go nicely. I’m not going out like this!

Clearly, the thought was written clear on his face; the cops frowned disapprovingly and one of the Growlithe snarled impressively. “You come clean with us, kid,” one of the cops said, coolly, “and it won’t be so bad. Don’t fight with us.”

Flight was out of the question, after her beat-down in the Gym earlier, and Sin was worn out after a day of long work, and weak against anything with Bite moves, anyway. With no other choice, Vice grabbed his third and last pokeball and threw it down against the broken pavement. “Let’s go, Fury!”

“Back down, kid,” the second cop growled, as the two Growlithe moved in on Vice’s Houndour. Fury bared his teeth, orange eyes glinting yellow in the glow from distant streetlights.

“I carry a job through to the end,” Vice responded simply, glaring unashamed at the older men. Fury backed up a pace as both Growlithe surged forward at once, then lunged as well, teeth snapping. None of the three dogs actually attacked, though; the feints were a sort of warning, telling-off, before the battle actually began. “Fury, use Crunch attack!”

“Bad choice, kid. Move, Rogers,” one of the cops yelled; the Growlithe on the left had already started moving.

“Davis, counter it with Take Down,” the policeman on the right hissed. His Growlithe lunged forward, bringing its full weight to bear as it slammed into Fury’s side. The Houndour stumbled with a yelp, but twisted and brought his teeth down with a snap on the loose skin on Davis’s haunches. The Growlithe cried out in animal pain and writhed in Fury’s unrelenting Crunch attack.

“Slam attack!” The first Growlithe, who’d avoided Fury’s first attack, charged down the Houndour and threw its entire weight into the impact between Rogers’s shoulder and Fury’s left side. With an embarrassing squeak, Fury dropped the hold he’d kept on Davis’s pelt and rolled over as soon as he hit the ground. There was blood dropping from his muzzle and his dark fur didn’t conceal the dirt and debris he’d collected on his pelt, thrashing around on the pavement. Groaning deep in his throat, Fury staggered to his feet.

Vice ground his teeth. It wasn’t looking great for him. “Flame Wheel attack both of them, Fury!” Fury had been born knowing Flame Wheel and it was one of his better moves; with a growl that rippled down his entire frame, he concentrated on the fire roiling inside himself; then, with a howl, he let it rip around himself, in little tendrils of flame that cycled around his body. “Attack!”

“Dour!” Fury snarled and sprang at the Growlithe, the pyrotechnic cyclone’s radius spreading out further with each revolution, eventually picking up the Growlithe in its spin. Both Growlithe yelped and surged into the cycle to avoid being caught for too long in the fire, both wincing at the heat. The dogs’ fire-proof pelts didn’t catch, but around their muzzles and paws, where the fur’s protection was weaker, dark burns were evident and they both limped with pain. When the fire cleared, both Growlithe panted, their eyes wide and the whites slightly yellowed, but Fury’s hackles were higher than his ears and it was clear the Houndour was a skip and a jump from collapsing. His dark tongue lolled limply between his jaws, and his sides heaved with exertion.

“Take it down with Fire Blast, Rogers!”

“Flamethrower, Davis!”

The Growlithe threw their heads back and howled; Fury tried to back away, but before he could slip out of their range, both dogs were breathing heavy streams of fire at him. Fury yelped, twisted, managed to move himself out of the burning river, and collapsed onto his side.

Vice frowned, his stomach twisting as the Houndour’s ear twitched, then flopped down against his skull. “Return, Fury,” he intoned neutrally, sliding the pokeball back into his pocket and raising his hands, submissively, into the air in defeat.

--

“It’s a nice cell, though.”

“Shut up, Vice.”

“You’re gonna wear a hole through the rock, Annie. Stop pacing, sit down, and relax.”

“Shut up, Vice!”

With a sigh, Vice lay back against the slightly-musty pillow on his little prison cot, absently petting his feather necklace, marveling at the cool, soft edge trailing over his palm, while he watched the girl in the next cell over prowl the length of her enclosure, back and forth like a rutted Delcatty in heat. He tried not to feel too exasperated- it was, after all, her first time in jail; her missions had never fallen this flat on their faces before. For Vice, this was cell number nine, and he couldn’t help but marvel how much cleaner it was than Petalburg’s prisons.

Actually, this might have something to do with why he had never made it up to Grunt rank.

Vice was eighteen, about five-foot-nine, which put him at eye level with most tall girls. He had a round face, an average build- maybe even a little pudgy, mostly when he overindulged in ice cream after those periodic successful missions- and black, shaggy hair that hung down to his shoulders. His eyes were light blue and his lips were pale and thin; his skin was bronzed, but clear and smooth. He was sweet, well-spoken, almost philanthropic (for a Rocket), and spent more time in jail than a convicted murderer.

As if she could read his mind, Annie suddenly stopped in her tracks and pressed her face against the iron bars separating their cells. “This is all your fault, you know,” she growled, her green eyes narrowed to slits. “I’ve never screwed up a mission. Every mission I’ve taken since I joined Team Rocket was a blazing success. And then the Boss throws a neophyte like you in my lap and tells me to make something out of you!”

“I’m not a neophyte,” Vice drawled, waving the feather with every word. “I’ve been in Team Rocket for longer than you!”

Annie’s eyes narrowed. “And you’ve successfully completed a third of the jobs as I have. Three quarters of all the missions you take, you fail. Do you know what that costs this organization?” For the first time since she’s started talking, she seemed to notice the feather. It glinted white in the dim light, and shivered, suddenly frigid, in Vice’s palm. He let it rest against his shirt again and rubbed his fingers against the waistline of his pants, hoping the friction of his skin against the rough fabric would warm away the sudden chill in them. “I thought they’d taken all our possessions.”

The guard slid the string off Vice’s neck. “What’s this?”

“It’s a feather,” was the smart-*** response. At the guard’s glower, Vice shrugged, unrepentant. “I don’t honestly know anything more than that. My parents left it to me.”

“Hmm. Well, I hope you don’t mind if we borrow it for a while.” The feather was dropped, callously, beside Sin, Flight and Fury’s pokeballs.

Vice had only shrugged. “You’re welcome to try.”


Annie looked suspicious; her bright eyes were studying the feather as though it were their key to salvation and her partner had been keeping it from her all this time. Vice snorted. “They did take all our possessions.”

“But they let you keep your necklace?” The question was oddly pointed, and Vice honestly didn’t know at the moment what was going through her head. Did she think he was conspiring with the police or something, just pretending to be in custody with her? If he had, he would have cut the act a long time ago.

“Oh no, they took it, too.” With a shrug, he slipped the string back over his head and tucked the feather down under his shirt. Against his skin, it was shockingly cold, and he frowned as he felt every soft line seem to suck the heat from his body. “It just decided it liked me more than them, is all.”

Annie’s eyebrows furrowed, then she snorted. “That’s stupid of it.” Something in her voice betrayed more suspicion, and Vice, suddenly on edge, felt the need to come completely clean to someone.

“I’ve had it for twelve years, y’know?” Being compulsively honest was a new feeling for Vice; he felt there was no harm in telling Annie everything he knew about his special little necklace, since ‘everything he knew’ barely took two minutes to tell. “Twelve years, and I’ve never lost it. I’ve never been able to leave it at home or drop it on the road or lose it or give it away. It always comes back to me, so I figured- why the hell not live with it? It’s a pretty piece of jewelry, at least.”

Annie snorted in response and flopped backwards on her bed. “You’re insane, do you know that, Vice?” Her eyes, penetrating and clear, landed on his from across the prison. “Plus you look like ****. How long has it been since you slept?”

If he looked anything like he felt- freezing cold and increasingly tired- he didn’t blame her for worrying- except that Annie worrying was like a Arbok rehabilitating injured Pidgey. “Hmm?” She’d never really cared about his welfare before- maybe the compulsive honestly was a contagious thing, and now she had to let go of her defensive pretensions at apathy. He somehow couldn’t imagine it. “I don’t know. I slept some last night.”

“You do have a plan to get us out of here, don’t you, Intern?”

Damn, his pretty jewelry was freezing. Vice suddenly felt, unexpectedly, exhausted, as though the cold had sapped every bit of energy his body had to offer. He inched backwards on his little cot and lay back on the thin mattress, ignoring the pile of sheets and blankets at his feet. “Of course,” he mumbled in response, his head hitting the single pillow and finding it the most comfortable bit of furniture he’d ever encountered. Annie said something else that was probably a question, but Vice didn’t hear it.
 

EmberGryphon

Meowth Fanatic <3
Here's the fourth chapter, if anyone out there is reading. ^_^

I'm not -really- happy with it. I probably would be if I had gotten some critisism on the other chapters. Ahem. :3

Chapter Four

Tsunami

--

Twelve years, three months and fourteen days ago, Vice’s father had left in the middle of the night during a record-breaking rain storm that left twelve inches of standing rain on Goldenrod’s brick streets. Two days after that, Vice’s mother had followed him.

They said she had probably killed herself. Drowning was popular these days. The money the household had once bragged about was gone, the emotional depression had chased away the dad, the mom didn’t really have many options left to her. There was no body, but she was a naturally fastidious woman; she wouldn’t have exactly left herself lying out in the kitchen for her only son to find. There was no suicide note, but some people, the head detective said, have nothing left to say.

And six-year-old Vice, his long hair tumbling into his eyes, had looked the policemen in the eyes the day after the start of the investigation, and had asked where the body was.

The police had told him he had a very nice Granma, who he’d never met but who was very excited about meeting him, in Petalburg City.

He’d asked again where the body was, suspecting that with his two front teeth so newly fallen out it might be hard to understand him.

The detective had looked upset; he hesitated, then had taken him aside, put his arm around Vice’s shoulders, and told him, in a husky whisper, that his mom was in a better place, now, and Vice had to be brave. He told him that everything was going to be alright, and if he needed to cry, that was fine, because the bravest of all men cried when it was necessary.

Vice closed his eyes, waited for the tears to come and, when there was no tell-tale prickle between his eyelids, had asked once more where the body was.

He had loved his mother, after all, and wanted to be sure that her body was alright. He was scared for her.

His Granma in Petalburg city was not so excited as the police made her seem to meet her grandchild. Moreover, her brain could possibly have been in better health, and that made for problems on occasion; during the best of times, she blamed Vice for her daughter’s death, while sometimes, she asked Vice when his mother was coming to pick him up (she played Bingo on Wenesdays, didn’t Dawn remember that she couldn’t babysit on Wenesdays?), while during the worst of times she simply stared at Vice, blankly, as if knowing, knowing there was a reason there was a child in her house, but not being able to recollect for the life of her, why.

No one ever told Vice if they had found her mother’s body, and his Granma never watched the news. For the first four or five years after his mother’s death, Vice craved the closure of a mother’s body, or a middle-aged female skeleton. As he grew up, he wouldn’t be able to place why he’d never hoped for his mother’s survival through the storm. Part of him, he guessed, had always known she was hanging by a thread, and had sensed the thread snapping that one night twelve years, three months and fourteen days before the most terrifying and exciting night of his eighteen years of life, following the ninth time he was arrested.

When he was ten, or maybe eleven, he gave up on having that lacerated part of his life kissed and made better. A bit of him would never have that closure, that finality. And he got over that, within a year, maybe two.

When he was fourteen, he decided the time had come for him to start his pokemon journey- so he snuck out one night, found a trainer on his own on the street, and stole the pikachu right off the man’s belt.

Once the prize was in his palm, Vice felt a flush of pride and then a stronger one of pure, animal terror. If he had kept walking, he could’ve gotten away with it, but, with a sharp intake of breath, he spun on one heel and bolted the opposite direction, away from the man he’d just stolen from.

He got a lucky break most theives don’t get, although luck is a subjective factor at the best of times.

The victim of his first pick-pocketing happened to be named Thorn, a Rocket Grunt who was more than willing to help Vice develop his skills, as a theif and, later, as the brawn half of the brains-and-brawn operation that was Team Rocket. When Thorn’s Houndoom had a litter of puppies, Vice got first pick; after he got Fury, he stole Flight from a karate instruction studio and managed to slip Sin away from a pokemon breeder as an egg. When he was sixteen, he moved from learning under Thorn to becoming an official Team Rocket Intern.

“You should be promoted,” the Executive he spoke to said, speculatively, “within a few months, to Grunt. Don’t quote me on that.”

Two years later, and Vice was still an Intern. Maybe it was bad luck. Maybe there was some incompetence mixed in. Maybe he just was never meant to be in organized crime.

Somewhere in there, of course, the Silver Feather mixed in, but it had been such a presense in Vice’s life that it was hard to pinpoint exactly where it had entered into the equation, and even harder to determine how it had affected the events. He’d never lost it; not for lack of trying, but it always found its way back.

--

“Vice?” No response; the Intern was out like a light. Pouting, Annie crossed her arms over her chest and snapped, “Intern!”

“Hmm?” Drearily, those blue eyes opened, slits at first, then all the way as he registered, bit by bit, where he was, who he was with, why he was there, and the fact that Annie was standing in six inches of water and looking as ****** off as he’d ever seen her. “The ****’s goin’ on?” he slurred, skipping over the preposistion completely as he staggered to a sitting position.

“Indeed it is,” Annie responded icily.

“Prison’s flooding?”

The Grunt rolled her eyes with perfect ennunciation. “It would appear so, yes.”

Vice fastidiously rolled the legs of his pants up to his knees before he hopped off the bed, an expression of extreme distaste marring his mouth. “Ugh. I hope it’s not from the toilets.”

“It’s not.” Annie lifted a bit of water in her cupped hands and looked down at it. “Taste it.”

“Excuse me?”

She rolled her eyes as though he has just said something entirely stupid. “Just do it, Intern.” As if illustrating her point, Annie lifted her hands up to her face and darted her tongue in and out of the water. Frowning in mingled disgust and curiousity, Vice obediently followed her lead, grimancing at the briny taste as it stung his lips.

“Sea water,” he said, letting the water fall with a splash down to the pool at his ankles. It looked like it had risen another half-inch just as they talked.

Annie’s mouth moved like a talking woman’s, but a sudden howl that ripped through the building made it impossible to tell whether or not she actually made any sound. Vice had made it, quite without thinking, to a corner of his cell before he realized it wasn’t an animal sound; Annie, glaring at him like a playground bully might glare at a particularly retarded child, beneath even beating up, before following his lead to the edge of her enclosure and gliding her fingers over the one stone wall of her cell. The prison was a stone building, the cells seperated from themselves and the halls by the iron bars.

As he, too, inspected the building’s wall, Vice realized that the howling noise was omnipresent at this part of his cell- belatedly, he realized it was the wind outside. Another loud gust sent chills down his spine while, with a cry of victory, Annie found what she was looking for. Whirlpools of water by a small part of her cell belied a small opening and the Rocket Grunt fell to her knees and started tracing it with her fingers.

“It’s a vent. I knew when I heard the wind outside, there had to be a vent in one of our cells. It’s right here.” Her mouth twisted up in vicious victory, and she staggered to her feet, her prison pants soaked through. Vice looked down at the pooling sea water; it looked like it had risen to eight, maybe nine inches high.

With a loud, echoing crack, Annie backed up one pace and kicked the metal vent hard with her sneaker. The sound was somewhat muffled by the water around it, but not completely, and every iron bar shivered with the snap of the inpact.

“What the hell are you doing, Annie? Someone’s gonna hear you!” Splashing all the way, Vice dragged himself to the bars seperating their enclosures and grabbed one in each hand. “There’s gotta be a better way of breaking out than that!”

“We’re the only ones here, Vice,” Annie informed him calmly, taking a quick break to kick at the vent again, slamming another hard hit into the center of the metal flaps. “The guards left half an hour ago to see what was going on, why the building was flooding. They never came back. In half an hour, the water level’s rose six inches, and it doesn’t sound like it’s letting up out there. We have seven-foot ceilings, Vice, so give it seven hours and we’ll be rats in a water bottle. Not the way I plan on going out.” When her foot connected again, Vice saw the metal bend under the impact; the fifth time, the vent fell away, outside the building. The water was flooded up outside, too; the water level seemed like it was rising faster. From outside, Vice could hear the storm; it sounded like a very windy, very large, waterfall.

Annie backed away a couple steps, then walked back over to the bars seperating her’s and Vice’s cells, patting the slick, white fingers that so tenuously clung to the iron. “Don’t worry, Vice,” she told him, with a sigh. “I’m gonna duck out there, circle back around, and come back in here for you and the pokemon, alright? So hold still and wait for me.”

“Annie, look around you,” Vice told her, pointing to the water. “I don’t have seven whole hours anymore. Look at the rate the water is rising!” It was visible, now, the water level swelling up around their knees. “I can get myself out of here. You don’t know what it’s like out there- you could be throwing away your only chance to escape...”

“Oh, don’t feed me that ********.” Looking fully annoyed, Annie braced her elbows against the iron bars and leaned forward to look her Intern square in the eyes. “We’re in this mess in the first place because you have all the raw, untapped talent of an intoxicated Feebas, so don’t try the macho, ‘I’ll take care of myself,’ thing. You dragged us into this mess, so I’m dragging us out, alright?” She reached as far through the bars as she could and patted him on the shoulder, then slogged her way through the cold water, back to the vent. “And I wouldn’t leave my pokemon to drown, anyway, even if I didn’t care whether you lived or died.”

She pulled her hair back away from her face, knotted it at the nape of her neck, and plunged under the cool, heavy surface of the water. Unwilling to open her eyes to the brine, she floudered underwater until she found the opening where the vent had been and crawled through the small, square opening, writhing until her shoulders, then her chest, were freed from her prison cell. The edge of her shirt caught against one of the rusted screws that had once held the vent in place and she panicked, thrashing until the fabric tore; then her waist, thighs, knees and finally feet slipped through the hole and she floated up to the sweet, cool air of freedom.

Meanwhile, Vice waited. It seemed to take a very long time, and he had nothing to occupy himself except for the steady, muffled thunder of the storms outside and the outline of ice that was the feather against his chest.

After what seemed like weeks, and when the water was up past his thighs (about where he realized how very very cold it was) and was starting to lap at the bottom fray of his shirt, a fumbled splashing at the end of the hall signalled Annie’s half-jog down the width of the building. “The door was locked,” she whispered appologetically, her demeanor drastically changed from when she had kicked loudly and brazenly at the metal vent until it fell out. She was pale, soaked through, wide-eyed and terrified. A pile of pokeballs were in her crooked arms, and a brass key was wedged between white fingers. “I had to- I had to force it open. It almost heard me.” The pronoun threw Vice off and for a second he wasn’t sure how, exactly, the door would go about hearing itself being forced open.

“What almost heard you?”

She dropped the pokeballs to the ground and forced the key into the lock. The sound of metal scraping rusted metal was unpleasant but muted against the constant wet sounds where the water bucked up against the dripping wet walls. “Oh, God, Vice, it’s Hell out there.” Her hands were moving now as if unconnected to her body; her elbow swung back and forth without control, like a pendulum, but the key didn’t turn. She wasn’t even looking at the lock, now; she was staring at the ground. “I was so scared.”

Despite everything else, despite the omnipresent threat of meeting his watery grave there in the Cianwood prison, Vice found Annie admitting a compromising emotion much more terrifying than anything else he’d seen that day.

Going by what they called Trainer’s Intuition, Vice snatched Sin and Fenris’s pokeballs and Flight’s greatball from the water where Annie had dropped them, and slipped the latter two into his pocket. The first one, he opened in his palm, not wanting to lose it to the water by throwing it.

“Let it go, Annie. Sin, open the lock.” Annie let her hand fall away, leaving the key in the lock; the crunch and shriek of metal, scraping, scratching, and crumpling down to nothing, was this time plenty audible over the background noise of their watery surroundings. With the hiss of rusty joints, the door hung open a little; recalling Sin, Vice opened it all the way and slogged into the hallway.

The prison was completely abandoned, except for the two of them. Cianwood had a low crime rate, like most of Johto; still, the lack of guards, or officials, or police, was disconcerting at best. The splashes and thuds they made, wading towards the exit, echoed in the silent building.

They reached the door and hesitated. Annie’s face was ghostly pale; the electricity, Vice realized as he squinted to make out her facial features, must have gone out some time before he woke up, because he hadn’t noticed its absense until now.

“We could stay in here,” Annie said, in one blustery breath.

“No, we couldn’t,” Vice told her, and opened the door.

At first, Cianwood was invisible; they were squinting at the city like a bride through layers of her veils, soaked through with the rain before they could even get all the way outside the building. The wind ripped the air from their lungs, their throats, their mouths, and pulled on every part of their body it could touch, leaving them spinning in a vaccuum. The rain was falling in every variety possible- an omnipresent mist, a sheet of sparkling water; small drops crashing down with fierce, stinging velocity; medium drops as hard as hail; and thick, fat snowballs of water that crashed into one’s face and seeped into one’s eyes. The prison was on a hill, and that had been all that had saved them- below, in the main part of the city, the water had piled up five, maybe five and a half feet. Cars were floating, tipped over on their sides or upside-down. Houses looked like rocks sticking up out of a river, and Vice was trying to look at them from behind a waterfall. Far away- looking further than ever with the rain distorting distances- the beach was wild, untamable; waves were rising up huge, towering over the roofs of the mouses, then crashing down with merciless fury.

And above it all, a bird shape swooped, circled, and screamed, its white wings spread wide, the wind following its every movements.

Vice stood stock-still, like a Rattata in a Fearow’s gaze, and tried not to feel the shadow smothering him.

“It can see us,” Annie wailed, right behind him and to his right. With a start, Vice broke out of his hypnosis and started to plow forward, against the wind, slugging through the water.

“No, it can’t,” he assured her. He caught her wrist and kept her right behind him as they trudged closer and closer to the city. And Lugia, for its part, honestly seemed unable to see them; it continued its wicked and dangerous dance, screaming in delight as the island shrank and shrank away.

They were chest-deep in the water before they finally came into the edges of the city. There was no one here; the chaos was over, they were either long gone or dead. Houses were buckling under the weight of the water, or were already falling apart; the roof slid off one of the homes as they passed it, splashing loudly in the water and causing a two-foot-high ripple to shiver through the flood, gushing water over Vice and Annie’s heads and tilting an upside-down car up sideways before it slid back onto its roof again, bobbing from one position to back a couple times as the ripples shook it back and forth.

“Oh God. Vice.” Annie squeaked, her fingers suddenly digging furrows into Vice’s shoulder. “There were people in that car.”

Vice stared at her for a second before he was certain she wasn’t, for some reason only Aruseus would know. By the expression on her face, saving them wasn’t an option anymore.

He didn’t want to look, but he glanced over his shoulder before he could stop himself, and stopped cold, a certain frigid feeling creeping into his bones as he saw....

They might have been the bad guys, but in the soft-edged world of pokemon battles, dead people simply didn’t factor smoothly into the equations of mass chaos and complete evil, and not even the most hard-core Rockets Vice worked with, even the ones who accepted things like the massacre in Lavender town with cool acknowlegment- knew exactly how to handle death- human death, pokemon death, permanant death.

Suddenly, Vice needed to get out of the city, right away. He could have dealt with the crazy creature in the sky, with the storm, the suffocating winds and rain, the flood, the caving-in houses- but the idea that he was surrounded, potentially, by corpses- real, once-alive, now dead, dead people, was too much. He shied away from another car and turned back to Annie. “You need to let Leviathan out now.”

“Now?” Annie asked, trepidiciously. She glanced at Vice, then glanced at Lugia- maybe two humans, the monster wouldn’t notice, but once other pokemon got involved, especially large pokemon- who knew? But then she glanced over her shoulder, shuddered once, closed her eyes tightly, and popped open one of the pokeballs from her pocket. Leviathan the Gyarados stretched out, uncurling to his full length, and glared down at the two humans who rushed to his protective bulk.

Above them, Lugia screamed in pure rage, its wings ripping around its body, a new, harsher tempest sweeping through the city. His wet fingers slipping on Leviathan’s smooth scales, Vice followed Annie’s lead and clumsily climbed on the Gyarados’s back, clinging tenuously to one fleshy fin. Lugia screamed again, and the water began to recede away from them. For one long moment, Vice honestly didn’t know what to think- was Lugia leaving, now that another pokemon had showed up?

“Holy ****,” Annie said, staring over her shoulder. Vice follwed her gaze, studying the beach, staring in transfixed horror as one giant, towering wall of water; a foaming, rabid wave, loomed over them, curving, straining, threatening.

“Get in the air, Leviathan!” Annie shrieked, and Gyarados, seeming to think she was probably right, spread all the fins on his body as wide as they could go. On a good day, a Gyarados might have some trouble getting airborne; on a day like this one, where the wind could- and in some cases, did- pick up parts of houses, cars, small trees, and other things not originally meant to fly, it took no effort on the sea-serpant’s part to whisk himself into the sky.

The wave smashed down with a resounding, echoing crash, and the first line of beach-front houses crumpled into the ocean.

Leviathan started on a course down towards the ocean as soon as he had avoided the first wave, now fighting to move forward as the winds tried to drag him back. For a heart-stopping, terrifying second, it looked like Lugia was going to try and follow them- then the larger monster circled back to Cianwood, hovering over the city, circling over the island, shreiking as the land was reclaimed into the sea.

Leviathan settled into the relatively calm, open ocean, Cianwood Island now nothing but a pillar of wind and rain in the distance. Vice, feeling oddly numb, remembered asking to see his mother’s body, so many years ago, with such frank, false, hypocritical understanding of death and danger, and threw up into the deep, dark expanse of the ocean.
 

EmberGryphon

Meowth Fanatic <3
Bwaah. I always feel spammy when I start talking to myself in my threads. I'd stop posting this and stop bumping down other people's topics if I didn't really like this story. >____>

Anywho. Enough self-pity for the moment. ^_^ Next chapter's ready! (Sorry it's so long this time....)

Chapter Five

--

Olivine City

--


“....estimated over three hundred dead, with more than a hundred and sixty overflowing Goldenrod’s hospitals as they arrive in waves in ambulances from the ruins of Ecruteak. Survivors report seeing a large pokemon before the earthquakes that destroyed the city during the first annual May Festival- an artists sketch, seen to the left of the screen, is the common description given by most witnesses. Experts correlate this pokemon to the legendary Ho-oh, which is supposed to live in the West Tower in Ecruteak.”

Frey rolled over, buried his head into his soft pillow, and told the nightmare to go away.

“Shockingly, not even a day after the disaster in Ecruteak, a similar tragedy occurred in Cianwood City, completely flooding the small island. Around two hundred people have made it in boats or riding pokemon into Olivine City, but more than three quarters of the island’s population are still unaccounted for. Many experts say the two incidents are likely not unrelated.”

Frey lay on his side, staring at the patterns along the back of the couch, wishing he had the strength to stuff his fingers in his ears to keep this nightmare from touching him.

A different voice, somewhat stuffy and laconic, said, “Survivors in both situations report the presence of large, avian pokemon that seemed to be involved in to accidents. In the first situation, the pokemon bore a great resemblance to Ho-oh, while in the second situation, the pokemon resembled the legendary Lugia. My theory is that the environmental fluctuations were residual effects from the battle between Groudon and Kyogre in Hoenn. Both earthquakes and tsunamis travel as waves; those waves could, depending on the medium, have taken as long as they did to get from Hoenn to Johto. Lugia and Ho-oh, as the guardians of Johto, would have risen to protect their country from the unintentional attacks of the foreign legendaries.”

Frey closed his eyes, but couldn’t block out the memory of Ho-oh’s resounding scream as the world ripped apart. It hadn’t wanted to protect them. It was tearing the earth away, ripping away ‘its country,’ searching for the fire actively rolling under the rocky surface the way a child would rip away wrapping paper to get to the present inside.

He had been lucky to get away.

But where was he now?

Slowly, Frey sat up, one hand pressed against his head as if he needed to hold the fragments of his skull together. His brain, spine and back pulsed with a dull, throbbing ache. He was lying out on a light brown-colored couch with pale pink floral pattern, with two white pillows from someone’s bed lined up at the end for his head. A stratchy wool blanket, washed-out olive green in color, pooled in his lap, but it didn’t provide either warmth or comfort, since Frey was still fully dressed. His clothes felt itchy, heavy and dirty, like they always did when he wore them to bed, and he had a vile, thick taste in his mouth that wouldn’t swallow away. He stretched out each leg individually, wincing at the wet pop in the knee when it stretched out all the way, then ran his fingers through the tangled mop of his hair. Someone new was talking on the television, and he tuned in just as the new qualified scientist finished explaning his own personal theory.

“In times of great fear or distress, the human instinct to be ‘part of the herd,’ so to speak, becomes somewhat overwhelming. If one person thought they saw a monster, and they screamed loud enough, in theory everyone could believe they saw a monster. It’s called, loosely, the Witch-Trial theory- if you’re scared there’re witches about, and your neighbor says your friend acts like a witch... well, she starts looking an awful lot like a witch to you, too.”

“So, Professor Redwood, you think both Ho-oh and Lugia were mass hallucinations, not actual pokemon?”

“First off, let me say that there is no evidence even suggesting either Ho-oh or Lugia exist. So yes, I do- and it’s interesting you would bring up that analogy. Fear releases certain chemicals into the human neurological systems that can be similar to the effects of certain drugs- it can alter behavior, become mildly addictive, and effect the parts of the brain that distinguish reality from fantasy. I think it’s unlikely that Lugia and Ho-oh are suddenly popping up out of our legends- but I think it’s more than possible that during times of intense crisis, people can make themselves believe that they are.”

A hallucination.

Frey heard the bird- Ho-oh?- scream again in the back of his mind. He felt the sound ricochet through his body, echo along his spine- and could not believe that his neurological complex had made that up. Closing his eyes against the news anchor’s cheerful face, he suppressed a shudder and let his face fall into his hands.

“Purrrrsian!” Suddenly, the couch buckled and shifted as a large weight came flying out of no where and crashed into Frey’s side. Loki was purring like a jet engine, his tail lashing back and forth, his soft head bumping again and again against Frey’s shoulder- then, with a low, offended growl, he sank his teeth into his master’s ear.

“Ow. Ow! Get of the couch, you damn bipolar!” It took almost all his strength to shove the huge cat off the couch, and when he finally managed, Loki more hopped off the coushions than fell. Sitting upright with regal dignity, he glared for a long moment at his master, then allowed a half a purr and rubbed possessively against Frey’s knee.

“Yeah. Glad you made it through alright, too, Lucifer,” the human element of the team muttered, scratching the soft fur behind Loki’s ear.

“You’re awake!” The voice was loud enough to startle Frey, tinged with a deep country drawl. Its owner, a portly woman in a flower-print sundress, walked boldly into the room, flicking back tendrils of her messy, blonde hair that was raked up into a bun but still spilled out across her face. Loki stood up, turned a tight circle, and sat down again.

“Yeah,” Frey managed, standing up to take the woman’s hand in his own. Despite her mild corporulence, her hands were soft and dainty; they were large enough to be like spiders against his palm and the fingers were calloused at the end, but he was surprised at the elegance present in the fragile bones. “I can’t imagine what state you found me in; thank you for your kindness.”

“It was nothing, dear. Richard? Rich, come in here, darling, the boy woke up.” Loki let out a small growl and positioned himself between Frey’s legs and the woman’s stocky frame, as though protecting him from some great danger.

“You have an interesting cat, you know,” the woman laughed, not bothering to try and pet the Persian in question. “We fed your Tauros when we found you last night, and tried to let this one out to eat, but he wouldn’t have it. He bit poor Richard and terrified the girls, and then just sort of turned circles around your couch, there, and took baths every now and then. We thought maybe it would be for the best if we got him back in the pokeball, but he wouldn’t have it.”

“Ah! Good to see you awake!” The man- Frey assumed it was Richard- came striding into the living room, a pair of faded overalls pulled taut over his broad stomach. “Are you feeling alright, son- would you like anything to eat?” His eyes glittered with some mischeif. “I’ll bet my wife was prattling on just now without even introducing ourselves.”

“Oh, hush, Richard,” the wife interrupted him. “We only just started talking, it was barely prattling on.” Then she flushed pink and turned back to her guest. “But my name is Melissa Moo-Moo. My husband and myself run the Moo-Moo Milk Farm.”

“Richard, that’s me,” the man said, smiling broadly at his wife. All animosity, real or feigned, had vanished between the couple. Frey shook his hand, too, and was surprised at the strength in his grip.

They took him around to the front, Loki trailing behind the whole way, casting furtive glances at both farmers. Aegir was dozing in the corner of the feild, while a couple Miltank napped around him, or trotted sluggish circles around the field, grazing or chewing cud. “It’s a lucrative little business,” Richard said thoughtfully. “Our milk is world-famous, you know.”

“Well,” Frey said, quietly, “thank you for interrupting your business to help me out. I do appreciate it.”

Richard laughed, a loud, gleeful belly-laugh. Frey, who grew up in a world of snickers and smirks, almost jumped in surprise. “Anyone with a Tauros is welcome around here, son,” he said, his broad hand enveloping Frey’s narrow shoulder. The gypsy managed not to try and duck out of it. “And if it were Miltank mating season, I think we’d have to make you stay for a while.”

Farmers could just say things like that. Frey felt his ears getting warm.

Aegir’s round eyes opened slowly, and his wide mouth stretched in a yawn. Then he seemed to see Frey and scrambled to his hooves, his tails all lashing him simultaneously, whipping him forward before he had even gotten his balance. An excited canter brought the Tauros to the edge of the fence, which Frey vaulted over so he could stroke his fingers through Aegir’s thick mane, and the bull could bump his head against Frey’s chest.

Richard and Melissa were the kind of people that wouldn’t, in any circumstances, turn a guest out hungry, and that included pokemon. At last satisfied that his master was neither dead nor in immediate danger, the second time the farmers tried to feed him, Loki only bit once at Melissa’s hand, didn’t try again when he missed, and dug into his bowl of coarsely-chopped greppa berries.

“I’m sorry about him,” Frey said, wincing when he saw a bright red scar on Richard’s hand.

Richard laughed again. Frey was getting to like that sort of laugh; it had a very honest sound to it. “Don’t worry about it,” he said genially. “Sometimes you get some sour Miltank, too; it’s a pokemon’s nature. Besides, his master’s fresh out of trouble- it’s a trying time for any creature.”

Frey was treated to a meal of waffles with real butter and thick, sweet syrup, garnished with a sprinkle of oran berries, a pile of crispy bacon and a cold glass of Moo-Moo milk. Melissa packed him some extra berries, some poffin grains for Aegir (who was fed a ration of Miltank feed while Frey and Loki were eating) and a few large containers of Moo-Moo milk. “It perks a tired pokemon right up,” she was saying, cheerfully. “Do you know where you’re going?”

In all honesty, he had planned to get to the beach and stow away on the first boat to Kanto. “Not really. Olivine, I guess.”

“Were you in Ecruteak?”

He’d walked right into that one. Richard and Melissa had oh-so-politely kept from asking him where he was from, or what had happened to work Aegir into the state he must have been in, dragging a fainted, or knocked out, or passed out, or blacked out gypsy down Route 118, and Frey hadn’t been in any hurry to relive the adventure. Now there was a sort of awkward silence as Frey’s mind filled with Ho-oh’s screams.

Then Melissa laughed, an uncomfortable but nevertheless gentle sound. “That was rude of me,” she said, and finished up stuffing supplies into Frey’s new pack.

“No, it wasn’t,” Frey assured her, but didn’t vollunteer an answer to her question.

They helped him leave around noon, tying his packs onto Aegir’s haunches and making sure he had everything he needed before riding the Tauros, bareback, away from the farmhouse. Loki, at long last content that everything was alright, allowed himself to be recalled into his pokeball as they left the strangers behind in the dust.

Frey had heard all about Kanto’s rich, vivid forests, green vines snaking around tree trunks so wide around Weedle sometimes got lost trying to climb them, and about Hoenn’s famous fields of volcanic ash, but to him, Johto’s wide plains had much more to offer. In some places the grass was tall enough to brush against his waist from where he was sitting on Aegir’s back, and the Tauros had to take extra care not to dislodge too many Kakuna from where they were suspended in the brush. Wild Meowth, skinnier and lankier than the city-type, their fur a richer shade of cream to blend it better with the wild, yellow grass (in the off chance a Fearow should get the wrong idea about which pokemon was predator, and which was prey), slipped and slunk about Aegir’s hooves, to curious to ignore the heavy Tauros, but too cautious to get too close. Magnemite, completely without fear for the normal-type bull, swooped in and out, investigating human and pokemon with short, high-pitched supersonic blasts. The occasional Rattata was brave enough to burst out of the brush and hiss, bark, then vanish again, while the larger, more vicious Raticate was more than willing to try and take a bite out of Aegir’s leg. Even the boldest of these, however, was quickly dissuaded by sharp, hard hooves.

As they got increasingly close to Olivine, however, the Magnemite got more and more rare. The powerful, salty smell of the ocean was enough to dissuade any steel-type from getting close enough to rust. Four or five hours away from the farm and closer to Olivine, and the Meowth began getting bolder and rounder, more used to the humans and well-fed off their garbage and, sometimes, the little bowls of pokefeed left out for them. Rattata and Raticate, usually regarded as less endearing or asthetic pests, also grew larger, flourished with better color, but grew a little more rare, their once great numbers thinning out as the Meowth population grew denser. The spicy odor of Meowth scent-marks signalled them every time they crossed into another male’s territory; Meowth claimed territory with amateur abandon, not bothering to defend their lands once they claimed it, rarely showing any respect for another cat’s boundaries and in fact showing an almost social attitude towards others of their species. When they evolved, they would keep these territories more strictly, defending them against other male Persian, while allowing male and female Meowths into their land to form a sort of pack around them.

Daytime was fading into evening by the time they made it to the city, and their timing treated them to a gorgeous, fiery sunset over the indigo-colored ocean, a scene fresh off an Olivine post card. A formation of Pelipper glided over the breaking waves, each crowned with a snow-white cap of foam, while a lone Gyarados glided over the surface of the water, its care to not duck under the surface making it clear that it was a tame serpent, likely being ridden by its trainer. The docks were crammed with boats, from glistening, white yachts to delapidated fishing boats to ripped-up barges that must have barely made it from Cianwood, after the event they were talking about on the news that morning.

The streets were bustling, despite the hour- mostly thick-bodied sailors swaggering half-drunk from bar to bar in thick knots, trying not to trip over young children who darted down the street, wearing t-shirts and backwards caps. Trainers were lingering, awkwardly, in the streets, or searching out motels to spend the night. The pokemon center, Frey saw when he walked past, was packed with injured or fainted pokemon- the non-human injured from Cianwood, Frey suspected. Olivine’s gymleader, Jasmine, waded through the crowds of wounded monsters, doing everything she could to help out the nurses there. As uneasy as the trainers were about interrupting, Frey found an empty corner between the pokemon mart and a line of bars to feed Aegir and Loki, then, urging the Persian to eat faster than normal, recalled both of them and merged into the street crowds.

The mingled scents of the port city- human smell, smoke, salt water, fish pokemon- was starting to make him light-headed. The chunky boots the farmers had given to him to replace his sandals slipped as he walked and he stumbled forward, his knee landing in some unidentifiable mess in the street, and he paused, breathing deeply, trying to hold to the salty smells that made up Olivine to keep the memories of ash and magma from rising, unbidden, in his mind. He closed his eyes for a long moment against the neon signs and surging crowds of humanity and tried to ground himself- but he could feel a sort of hysteria coming closer, bit by bit.

Trying to force himself to feel normal wasn’t working.

Trying to force himself to pretend nothing happened wasn’t working.

Forcing it down, pretending be didn’t feel anything, pretending he could ignore anything that ever happened to him....

...was all he knew.

In the back of his mind, where he kept all of his secrets, Ho-oh, the legendary monster who stood for self-sacrifice, for beauty, for nobility, screamed viciously as the world burned away under its wings. As everyone Frey knew, everyone who had taken care of him...

Who knew where they were? Who knew whether they were still alive, still okay, burned away, burned to nothing?

He needed to go back and find them- and he couldn’t contemplate going back there. He didn’t want to see them if they weren’t still alive.

For the first time in Frey’s life, someone he knew, someone he loved, may have been dead.

He wanted to scream. Opening his mouth, he felt an outburst of horror, mourning, rage, fear, boiling inside of him. He almost choked on it.

“I hope there’s a motel with some vacancy somewhere in this city,” he muttered instead, and allowed the crowd to shove him along in its wake.

--

Annie sat in the middle of the beach as the sun sank away in a blaze of unparallelled beauty, staring at the sea, playing with Leviathan’s pokeball. Vice, still dripping wet, tired enough to collapse, and dressed in the Cianwood prison uniform, stood awkwardly beside her, wondering what they did, now. Neither of them had any money, even though Vice was ravenously hungry and completely parched from sailing on Gyarados-back all day long. He was pretty sure Team Rocket had a base in Olivine- they had a base in pretty much every city, even if most bases were small and uneventful places that didn’t serve as much more than a place to hide out in and maybe grab a new uniform or disguise. But he didn’t know where the Olivine hide-out was, and Annie wasn’t vollunteering any information.

“Are you alright?” The question caught him off-guard, and, honestly, he thought it was a little hypocritical of her to ask.

“I’m fine.” He leaned over to look her in the face; her expression was impossible to make out on the darkness. “Are you?

“I’m okay.”

“No, you aren’t.”

She smiled, a little ruefully. “No, I’m not. Come on, let’s go get something to eat.” Bracing her hands in the sand, she managed to wrestle to her feet. Wet sand clung to the back of her orange pants. “Honestly, I don’t know why you aren’t more freaked out.” She sounded almost normal, if you ignored the tremble in her voice.

He was more freaked out than he let on, but his voice was steadier when he said, “People die.”

She glanced over at him; as they got closer to the city lights he could see her expression, but he couldn’t read it. “You’re parents are dead, aren’t they?” The way she said it, blunt and a little cruel, made it bearible to hear.

“I guess so.”

“You don’t know?”

“Not really.”

She frowned, and looked away. The neon lights coming from Olivine set her red hair on fire, and her pale skin flared orange. There, looking like she was about to break down under images of dead people- really, actually, dead people- Vice had never seen anyone look stronger. “I’m sorry,” she said, finally. She didn’t sound like she really meant it.

Strangled by her callous acceptance, not sure whether he was grateful that she didn’t push the envelope or angry that she shrugged off the uncertainty that had ruined his life, Vice played it off with a shrug. “So’m I.”

The hide-out was in the north part of the city, which forced them to walk the entire length of the main street, dressed like absolutely nothing but escaped convicts, since no one, in Johto or even in America, dressed in bright orange jumpsuits by choice. Luckily, keeping as much in the shadows as they could and struggling to blend in with the crowds, they managed to keep from being stopped.

The base was in a supporter’s cellar, directly north from the Lighthouse. Johto might have had a pretty clean criminal record, but Team Rocket had many more investors than the League thought- the evil scientist angle was pretty profitable, and casual money-makers were interested in that sort of thing. It helped to have a crashing place, but the cellar was freezing, especially against their wet skin, and they hurried to get done. Annie broke the code for the safe in the corner of the room while Vice raided the uniform supply. Annie told him she was a size ten, and he promised on pain of death not to tell anyone.

They turned their backs on one another while they changed, as quickly as possible to keep from freezing to death, and wiping the water off their bodies as much as was humanly possible with unused uniforms. There was a comb in the base and they took turns using it- Annie got to go first because her hair was shorter and, because it was straight to begin with and not curly like Vice’s, much less tangled.

“You look presentable,” Annie told him, digging him out a maroon sweater to wear over the black shirt with the conspicuous red R on it. Holding her own cream-colored sweater in pale, small hands, she spread her arms for his inspection. “How’m I?”

He gave her the obligatory crude look-over. Her hair looked stringy and malnourished, but it had been soaking all day in the ocean, and it was still wet. She was pale and looked scared and that shirt made her look fat. Still, it was an improvement. “Not too bad,” he assured her, and pulled on the sweater. She smirked and followed in suit.

“Not drop-dead amazing?”

He laughed. “It’s been a long day.”

“Pig.” She preceded him up the ladder out of the cellar and tried to slam the door in his face, but he shoved up after her. It was dark, now; the sky was splattered with stars directly above them, but getting closer to the flourescently glowing Olivine they got swallowed up by the blue-grey expanse of space. The moon, orange-colored and half-filled, sat on the edge of the horizon like a very far creature resting on the surface of the sea. They walked down a street they couldn’t see under their feet, both trying to forget everything that had happened in the last twenty-four hours, since the last time they’d been wandering the streets and watching the stars.

“I’ve got some money, now,” Annie said, startling Vice out of his not-so-deep thoughts. “You wanna grab something to eat?”

They got a burger from a cheap beach-side cafe and ate it outside, sitting at a white plastic table and shaking salt and pepper at each other from the shakers. They were both laughing like crazy Mighteyena and covered in seasoning by the time the waitress came to take their cash and give them a dirty look at the dollar-fifty tip.

“Hey,” Annie said, and waved her back over. “Do you know anywhere we can stay the night?”

The girl looked like she was considering enacting revenge right there- but angry customers were generally worse to deal with than stingy, sophomoric narcissists. “I doubt the Peachy Pelipper’s full,” she said, speculatively. “I mean, it’s kind of out of the way, so most tourists don’t go there.” She wrote down directions on a napkin with a pen she kept in her apron.

“Alright, thank you,” Annie said, leading the way back through the cafe and onto the street. Vice waved as he left, and shrugged it off as the girl ignored him. Side-by-side, the two Rockets scurried down the street, reading the napkin as best they could any time they got close enough to a neon sign to make out the cramped handwriting, and ignoring tacky, touristy shops called Seel a Deal or The Krabby Side.

“Hey, Vice,” Annie muttered after they’d been walking maybe twenty minutes down the sidewalk. “Don’t look now, but we’re being followed.”

Vice twisted around to look.

He was bulky, maybe six feet tall, and wore what looked like a fur cape. The neon signs distorted color, but Vice suspected it was bright yellow, and it looked striped; thin black marks like those that decorated the cheesy handbags that came in department stores with fake labels hanging off. He was wearing a chunky leather mask, but the crowds had knocked it askew, and finally he reached up and took it off, letting his large spikes of yellow hair to fall into his face, which Vice couldn’t see before Annie had turned him around and smacked him on the back of his head.

“Don’t look now,” she said, sardonically. Vice flushed.

“Sorry.”

Annie glanced subtly over her shoulder and swore. “He knows we’ve seen him. He’s making his move.” She grabbed Vice’s arm and stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. The Intern could hear their stalker’s footsteps, coming closer, and was about to ask Annie exactly what she was planning when she suddenly lunged sideways for the street, and threw both of them into the bright white headlights from the oncoming traffic.

There was a symphony of screeching breaks and screaming horns- as well as some well-placed and creative profanity- but as far as Vice could tell, he was neither dead nor fatally wounded as he was pulled bodily across the street. With a flash of yellow, their stalker followed them into the street, but Annie kept going, darting between two stores, running down an alleyway, acting like she not only knew this city, but had planned it out and helped build it.

They hurried past Smoochum’s Sweet-tooth Candy Emporium, darted past the Golden Golbat Arcade, ducked behind Dewgong’s Drift Seafood Steakhouse, and managed to slide down Fifth Avenue before popping back up on the same street they’d started on. They’d managed to disrupt traffic seven times, coax swears from four pedestrians, cut through a drunk mob of sailors and plow over top a small child, but there was no sign of their stalker.

“Who the hell was that?” Vice asked, pulling his arm out of Annie’s grasp and massasing away the five finger-shaped aches in the muscle.

The older Rocket shrugged. “He looked like he could’ve been a bounty hunter. Some of them wear pokemon masks like that, to keep other Rockets from knowing who they are. Could just have been some crazy guy. Either way, I don’t want him following us.”

The silver feather wasn’t as frigid it had been on Cianwood, but it was cool against Vice’s chest. The Rocket frowned, and focused on following Annie.

The Peachy Pelipper was the classic beach-side motel, with the numbered room doors facing out and a creaky little elevator in the middle. It was neither particularly classy nor very sleazy, but they got one room with two beds for fifteen dollars for the night. The overweight, undershaven manager fished them out a key and told them their room number, then tuned out everything else they said. Unanimously, they voted to take the stairs rather than the elevator, and managed to find their room without much trouble. It wasn’t in great shape, but it didn’t have any particular odor and at the moment the clean, comfortable bed was looking as good as anything ever had to Vice, who slipped out of his sweater and his shirt and fell backwards onto the blankets. Annie followed in his lead, her white bra keeping her decency, more-or-less. They watched basic television for all of fifteen minutes, then they agreed to turn it off, shut off the lights, and get some sleep for the first time in what seemed like an eternity.
 
Hi Ember. This is quite an impressive ficcie. I'm guessing Lugia caused all that damage. I'll be keeping an eye on this ficcie.
Edit: I gave you 5 stars.
 

LukeArio

Thought Collector
I have to say, this is the best pokemon fanfic i've ever seen. You revamped and got deep into creating an entire society! Not to mention that you're a fabulous writer. It seems like you haven't added to the fanfic in quite a while. But i hope you do pick it up again. Phenomenal, what you've got so far.
 
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