The old man pushed the wheelchair away down the path, and the invisible presence seemed to go with them.
But the door stayed open. Waiting on Akiyama's decision.
He thought about it for a moment, then took Gardevoir's hand and walked in.
The door shut behind them without a sound.
He kept his eyes moving. The lawn had been trimmed even; individual blades stood up straight, catching rain. The doors to the main hall looked newly built, and a pair of white wind chimes hung beside them.
The wind moved through and they rang softly.
The old man pushed the doors open. There was light inside, and warmth spilled out—a fire going in the hearth.
Then he stopped and waited, as if Akiyama's feet had to move before anything else could.
"Garde?"
Gardevoir tipped her head toward him, asking.
"Might as well look. We came all this way." That mentality had gotten him into trouble in a previous life, and it hadn't loosened its grip a bit.
The umbrella had disappeared somewhere along the way. Strangely, no rain was landing on him. Something invisible was holding it off.
Crack-crack-crack-crack—
Glass on glass again. The Hyper Beam didn't so much as ripple the surface of the house.
The doors of the main hall banged open.
Pitch black inside.
Then a pair of crimson eyes surfaced out of it, the way something looks at prey.
"There you are. That's the little sneak." Nanami 's temper was fully loose now. "Gyarados. Hyper Beam. Straight through the door."
BOOM.
A dark violet sphere came out of nowhere and slammed into Gyarados's flank, breaking his charge.
Gyarados took the hit, and Gyarados took it personally. He threw his head back and roared, eyes going redder.
"Shadow Ball. That's it?" Nanami smiled. "Wreck the place, Gyarados. Nobody plays me like this."
"Outrage!"
Gyarados froze in place for a heartbeat. Then his eyes went blood-bright and his scales stood on end, and a howling, furious pressure came off him in waves.
He started hitting everything. The courtyard came apart around him.
Glass-on-glass rang out again and again. Sitting cross-legged on his head, Nanami found the sound genuinely irritating. She closed her eyes, and with each bright chime, her brows came a little closer together.
....
"Cozy, actually."
Akiyama stepped into the hall. The fire against the wall was roaring, spitting the occasional spark. A round table sat in the middle of the room, and the food laid out across it looked like it had come off the stove thirty seconds ago.
"It's not much. Hope you don't mind roughing it." The old man chuckled and rolled the wheelchair up to the table.
He sat. Another chair pulled itself back.
Someone else sat down.
Then everything stopped, with two chairs still untouched. Waiting.
Akiyama thought it over, pulled one out, and sat. He waited a beat, made sure nothing happened, and only then let Gardevoir sit.
If Nanami was the kind of reckless that goes straight through the wall, Akiyama was the kind of careful that gambles anyway.
Anyone else would have been three miles away by now. Not him. As long as Gardevoir was safe, he was willing to roll the dice.
His hard limit was never his own neck. It was hers.
The moment they were seated, the frozen tableau came back to life.
The old man handed a pair of chopsticks to the person who wasn't there, smiling.
"You don't see that often. Never thought anybody would come out this far."
"Is that right… a traveling Trainer. Pallet Town? Can't say I've heard of it."
Akiyama came fully awake at those two words and stared at the empty chair.
He'd already been sure this was a piece of somebody's past. He just hadn't expected the past to be this.
Ash, or Red?
Or Blue, or Gary—someone whose story he'd never gotten straight?
He thought about the Pikachu the old man had mentioned at the door. That narrowed it to two.
"We wanted to travel, once. Same as you," the old man said, laying food in his wife's bowl. "Never could get away. Reasons."
"You might not believe it, but we had a Pokémon of our own! A Gengar. Full of life, that boy."
Pride came into his whole face when he said it. Even the old woman, who'd hardly spoken, smiled and offered a few words of agreement.
A Gengar.
That fit. This whole place was probably fantasy energy the Gengar had shaped—a haunting, the kind that walks people in circles until they can't find the road.
The question was what he wanted. And why he'd split them up.
And where the hell Nanami was.
Gengar felt very sorry for himself.
Gengar had not known a human could be so completely unreasonable.
He watched the Gyarados finally settle down and flung another Shadow Ball out of the dark, furious.
"Back for more? Let's see exactly how thick that shell is."
"Gyarados—ignore him. Hyper Beam. Keep going."
Watching that thing keep shelling his house, Gengar's outrage curdled into something closer to grievance.
Who does that? Who shows up and just fires?
He hadn't split them on purpose in the first place. This woman had left him no choice.
So he pulled the illusion in and swallowed her and her Gyarados into the main hall.
Nanami 's vision went black. When it cleared she was somewhere else.
The hearth in this version of the hall was a ruin. The table was a lash-up of mismatched boards barely holding its shape. The floor was clean, though several planks had rotted through.
"Moved me again." She frowned.
This was more of a problem than she'd figured.
There was no room in here for Gyarados to do anything. She was forced down onto her feet. Every time he tried to move, that glass-chime sound rang out.
The space itself was only so big, and he was already more than it could hold.
BOOM.
A Shadow Ball came out of the shadows. Gyarados bellowed in pain and thrashed—and got nowhere, like a serpent jammed inside a washing machine.
"Annoying." Nanami 's teeth set.
She recalled him and reached for her belt.
Two balls left out of five.
No telling which two. She picked one and threw it.
......
"Really? You had a Gengar yourself, and a strong one? Now that's a coincidence." The old man seemed to be having a wonderful time with his invisible guest.
A Gengar of his own.
That put it on Ash. Akiyama didn't remember Red ever running a Gengar—and Ash had brought one out at the Masters Eight Tournament and Gigantamaxed it.
He stared at the empty chair, and for a second he almost thought he could see the outline of a person there.
He'd have given a lot to know what had actually been said in this room.
There'd been something about Red, too, somewhere in the archives. It had been too long. He couldn't dredge it up.
"That boy loves to fight. Always wanted to get out and see something. And the two of us could never leave, on account of the farm."
"We promised him. Sell the place, once things settled, and take him out to see the world—"
"And then my wife broke her leg. Bad break. Nothing for it but to spend the savings and put up this house so she'd have somewhere to mend—"
"…We let him down. Badly."
Something went out of the old man's face.
The old woman's expression went past sad and into pain. She struck her own dead leg with her fist, hard, blaming it.
~~
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