With the title of Honorary Trainer of the Orange Islands in hand, Ash had wrapped up the last thing he needed to do here.
Before parting ways, he agreed with Drake to meet for another match somewhere down the line when the chance came. Drake had even decided to step down as Head Trainer of the Orange Islands and head out into the wider world to gain experience.
Since taking the seat, the fame and overall strength of the Orange Islands had risen noticeably, but stacked against Trainers from outside, it still wasn't enough.
The Orange Islands' top-end combat power didn't come close to the standard high-end of a League region's Elite Four. The strongest the islands had to offer were the four Gym Leaders, and him on top of them as Head Trainer, and even between him and the Gym leaders the gap was enormous.
Even so, he still couldn't beat a League Conference Champion, and certainly not without being crushed in the attempt.
Put bluntly: his skills weren't good enough, beaten by a kid. Put politely: there was a lot of room for improvement.
Either way, if he kept sitting as Head Trainer in the Orange Islands, he could keep the comfortable feeling of standing untouched at the top, and that wasn't what Drake wanted.
He wanted real, solid growth in his own strength, to be truly unbeatable, not famous for show. So Drake stepped down from the title without hesitation, ready to head out and find his footing again. When he came back, he'd come back stronger.
By that time, perhaps Dragonite would have reached Peak Champion level. By that time, he'd have the capacity to lead the Trainers of the Orange Islands to grow stronger together, and to turn the whole archipelago into a true Orange League.
After saying goodbye to Drake, Ash, Misty, and Serena climbed onto Lapras and started the journey home.
The trip from the sea back to Pallet Town didn't take long in itself. A cruise ship out of the Orange Islands or a flight could cut the time down even further. They'd been in such a rush on the way out, though, that they'd missed plenty of scenery along the route, so now, with nothing pressing them, they took it slow and treated the trip back as a sightseeing run.
Seven leisurely days slid by. The three of them finally reached an outlying island at the edge of the archipelago. Once past it, they'd be back in the Kanto region, and not long after that, back in Pallet Town. Over that week the three traveled around and had a wonderful time, making up for everything they hadn't been able to enjoy on the way in.
The Orange Islands were a vacation destination at heart, and a month of play here would still leave plenty undiscovered.
While they traveled, Ash also tried to live up to the role of "mentor," teaching Serena and helping her work toward becoming a proper Trainer. Serena's basic knowledge was already far ahead of where Ash had started. She knew type matchups and the names of plenty of famous Pokémon.
For now, her only Pokémon was a Braixen that had evolved not long ago. For a beginner, one Pokémon was easy enough to handle and a smooth on-ramp. Once she had Braixen on solid footing, she'd need to start thinking about her second catch.
Serena didn't have a guiding belief like Misty's "Water types only." As for what Pokémon she wanted, for the moment she wanted cute ones, with combat power as a distant second.
That matched the thinking of plenty of young girls who'd just become Trainers. Many changed their minds later, of course, because cute Pokémon often had middling combat power and were a real handful to raise. Pikachu was the obvious example. Outside of Ash, no one had ever raised a Pikachu to a true success. Ritchie counted as half a success, at best.
Not all cute Pokémon were like Pikachu, naturally. Mew, the Lake Guardians, Latias and others were undeniably cute. The catch was, how many people would ever meet them, and how many could actually catch one? Better to settle on Pokémon that didn't look like much but hit hard, like Gyarados or Fearow. They were easier to catch and not too hard to raise.
Gyarados was a little tougher, sure, but Magikarp was a much more common Pokémon than Pikachu, and once it evolved it leapt straight up into the league of popular battle Pokémon. That kind of payoff had to cost something.
If you wanted easy to raise, decent in the early game, and devastating later on, then your best bet was a starter Pokémon. For a beginner, every region's starter was the strongest opening choice. Without a starter on hand, the usual transition was to lean on a Bug-type early on. If you did have a starter, all your focus went straight onto it.
That was exactly the situation Serena was in. As long as she brought Fennekin's line to its final stage, handling battles or catching Pokémon with real combat power became relatively simple.
In general, as your Pokémon's level rose, the strength of the Pokémon you could catch in the wild rose with it. If your strongest Pokémon was only at Mid Level, then even running into a High Level Pokémon in the wild left you helpless.
With a High Level Pokémon on your side, you stood a chance at catching one of the same tier. That said, this was a rough analogy, and meeting a High Level Pokémon in the wild was hardly easy. Even so, catching them was easier than raising one yourself, and that was the route plenty of Trainers took.
Ash, who raised every one of his Pokémon from zero, was very much in the minority. People who could pull that off generally became famous Trainers in their own right, the kind you'd find sitting on Elite Four panels or wearing the Champion's title in a League region.
For Serena, the smart move for now was to stick to the steps. Bring Braixen to its final form, then think about the next direction.
The three of them also ran into a few unexpected things over those seven days. One of them was that Team Rocket, missing for nearly a month, had popped back up. After a mess of that scale, even with someone posting bail, they shouldn't have been free for a long while. A month was a pipe dream.
On top of that, their backer Giovanni was missing too, and Team Rocket's top brass had no real attachment to those three. So who would bail them? Who even could? Ash never got an answer out of the Team Rocket trio either.
Later, when Serena saw them for the first time, the trio put on a live "human launch" performance for her benefit. Watching them rocket off into the sky, Serena murmured with genuine worry, "Will they really be all right, going up that high and coming down like that?"
She wasn't alone in that reaction. Anyone seeing the scene for the first time would have wondered the same thing. Pokémon were one thing, but humans falling from that kind of height?
Whatever it was, it had to be over a thousand meters, and the three of them had flown off to who knew where. By any normal arc of falling physics, they'd be flat on the ground and very dead.
Ash explained that the two humans and the talking cat had bodies harder than iron. A thousand-meter drop wasn't worth mentioning. Even if they came down as a meteor from low orbit, the worst they'd come away with was slightly dirty clothes. Whatever else they lacked, the Team Rocket trio were genuinely world-class at invention and at taking a hit.
Besides Team Rocket, the three of them ran into a worse group of people too.
The trio had done plenty of bad things, but "bad" was a relative word. After meeting Ash, every scheme they ran got pointed at him, and not one of them ever worked. By now, in Ash's eyes, those three weren't really bad. Just stupid.
The group he met after blasting those three away was a different story. Genuinely bad, no qualifier needed. They were the ones who had caused Ash's Lapras to be separated from her family in the first place: the poachers running the seas of the Orange Islands. Pirates, in short.
The pirate ship was full of them, around twenty all told, every face rough and unfriendly. When the three travelers came across them, the pirates were in the middle of chasing a Lapras pod. Ash moved at once and had Gardevoir lock them all down.
The pirates were stronger than he'd expected, though. The leader had a High Level Pokémon. That wasn't nothing, and it explained why the group had been able to run wild in the Orange Islands for so long.
Catching them at sea was hard, and the leader's strength outclassed most Trainers in the region. Even those who saw what was happening and wanted to step in stood no real chance.
The same went for most Officer Jennys, frankly. Officer Jenny's standard Pokémon tended to be Growlithe or Arcanine. Fire-types were already at a disadvantage on the water, and the pirates leaned heavily on Water-types, which countered them on top of it.
Even when Officer Jenny tracked the pirates down, an arrest was nearly impossible to make. So the group had stayed comfortable in the islands, and any rare Pokémon at sea unlucky enough to cross them rarely had a happy ending.
The Lapras pod had run into them not long ago, and although the pod had escaped, one Lapras had been cut off from the rest in the panic. That was the Lapras Ash had eventually rescued.
Now the same pirates ran into Ash a second time, and this time Gardevoir was on the field. The pirate leader could order every member of his crew to attack at once or unload the ship's cannons, and none of it landed. One Confusion from Gardevoir was enough to halt everything.
At it's current level, Gardevoir already commanded a slice of the world's raw forces. Anything below Elite Four was little more than a plaything in her hands, and human-made weapons like shells and missiles posed no threat at all.
Other Pokémon might struggle with those, but a psychic-type had a dozen ways to handle them. Psychic-types might have trouble fighting above their tier, but for raw versatility within their tier, none came close.
In the end, the arrogant pirate crew folded under Gardevoir's strength. All twenty-two aboard were captured, no one slipping the net.
Lapras was finally reunited with her family.
Watching the happy smile on Lapras's face when she was back among her pod, Ash quietly thought that perhaps the first goodbye of his journey was on its way.
Lapras had been ripped away from the pod by the pirates in the first place. Relative to a Lapras's full lifespan, the Lapras Ash had now was barely more than a newborn. Under Ash's care, her physique, combat power, and temperament had grown fast, but none of that changed the fact that she hadn't left infancy.
In that situation, the odds of Lapras returning to the pod were very, very high.
Ash had no intention of stopping her. He'd always put a Pokémon's choices first. If Lapras chose to go home to her family, he wouldn't try to talk her out of it. Her own parents against a human she'd known a little over a month, any normal Pokémon would know what to pick.
Except Ash's Lapras didn't seem to be a normal Lapras.
After a long, joyful reunion with her parents and the rest of the pod, Lapras started to move slowly on the water, drifting little by little away from her family. Under the stunned eyes of Ash, the other two travelers, and her own family, Lapras came back to Ash's side at the shore.
Her choice was to stay with him. The month she'd spent at his side had been short, but to her it had felt like being reborn. She was certain that even a full year with the pod wouldn't have brought her the kind of progress she'd made with Ash. And beyond the leap in strength, what mattered most was the way Ash had treated her, like she was already family.
Even away from the pod, even with her parents nowhere near, being beside him felt like home. He wasn't blood, but on her road of growing up he might as well have been.
To repay him for saving her life and raising her, and for the sake of her own future, Lapras chose not to go back to the easy comfort of family. She chose Ash, and the road ahead with him.