The mountain was hollow, full of Pokémon, and not one of them would come near Ren.
They had been inside Mt. Moon for an hour, following a string of dim lamps some earlier trainer had strung along the wall, and Ren had decided somewhere around the second cavern that she was going to catch something tough. She had said so out loud. "Pidgey's a flier and the Butterfree's a sweetheart. I want something that hits back. A brawler. Something with rocks in it." She had cracked her knuckles when she said it, which Adam felt was probably the whole problem.
There was a Geodude sitting on a ledge not ten feet away, exactly the kind of squat, grumpy boulder she was describing. Ren fixed her eyes on it. The Geodude took one look back at her, went very still the way a mouse goes still, and then rolled off the ledge into a crack in the wall and was gone.
"Okay," Ren said. "Rude."
A little further on, a knot of Zubat hung from the ceiling. She looked up at them, considering. The entire knot peeled off the rock at once and flapped away down a side tunnel like she'd fired a gun.
"They're running from me," Ren said slowly.
"You don't say." Adam gave her a pitying look.
"Why are they running from me. I haven't done anything."
[ Wild animals stay alive by knowing what to run from, Ren. To them you are a predator. The clever ones leave before you finish looking at them. ]
"I'm friendly," Ren said, wounded.
A Sandshrew that had been minding its own business six feet away immediately dug straight down into the cave floor and disappeared.
Adam lost it. He had to stop walking and put a hand on the cold rock wall, laughing hard, and the Mankey looked between him and Ren with deep suspicion, because it did not understand the joke but strongly suspected it was being left out of one.
"It is not funny," Ren said, which made it much funnier.
"You knocked out the first wild thing you ever met in this world," Adam managed. "With one touch. Before it even understood it was in a fight." He wiped his eyes. "Word gets around. You're a horror story they tell little Rattatas at night."
"I caught a Pidgey and a Caterpie and they love me."
"You manhandled the Pidgey and the Caterpie was thinking about leaves." A Clefairy poked its head out from behind a stalagmite ahead of them, saw Ren, and its little face showed horror before it quickly ran away. "See. Even that one. And that one's an idiot."
Ren watched the empty spot where the Clefairy had been. For a second she almost looked hurt, and Adam felt the laugh go out of him, because she really had wanted a new pokemon.
"They'll come around," he said, gentler. "You're not out of luck right now. Give it a day or two. The ones with any sense will figure out you're worth standing next to." He bumped her shoulder with his. "I am not having any luck either."
"You ran too," Ren said. "When you met me."
"I ran toward you."
"Mm, fist swinging," she said, looking like a hurt puppy.
"Ehm, don't be like that." He held her in his embrace. "For the record, I am thankful I chose you. Let's not mention how it happened."
Ren didn't say anything to that. She just took his hand in the dark of the cave. They went on like that for a while, the wild Pokémon keeping their distance, and for once she seemed fine with it.
Then the tunnel opened into a wider chamber, and there were voices in it that did not belong to Pokémon.
Three men in black stood around a flat stone where somebody had laid out two grey lumps of rock on a cloth, careful, the way you'd lay out something valuable. A fourth person, a skinny kid in a lab coat two sizes too big, was backed against the wall with his hands up. The red R was on every black shirt. There was no hiding it in here.
"They're fossils," the kid in the coat was saying, fast and frightened. "They're just fossils, they're not even worth anything until you revive them, you need a proper lab, you can't just—"
"We know what they're worth," one of the grunts said. "And we know exactly which lab. Bag them."
Adam stepped into the lamplight. He didn't Veil, didn't reach for anything, didn't so much as raise his voice. He just walked in like he owned the cave and was mildly annoyed to find people in it.
"Well hello there," he said. "Are you the bad guys?"
The grunts turned. What they saw was two people who were now their problem, a man with a furious little monkey by his side and a woman who was, right now, looking directly at them.
The Pokémon in this chamber did not have the option of running away. Their trainers made them fight. It was quick, and it was not close. The Mankey took the first grunt's Rattata off its feet with a Low Kick before the man finished his command, moving the way Adam had drilled into it in the forest, all footwork and no waste. Ren didn't even send the Pidgey up; she just pointed, and the bird did the rest; an Ekans and a Zubat went down under a pair of dives so fast they blurred into one motion. The third grunt looked at his two friends face-down in the dirt, looked at Ren, and made the smart choice the wild Pokémon had all been making, which was to leave very quickly.
"They always run," Ren said, watching him go. "See."
Adam crouched by the flat stone, letting Sage examine the rocks.
[ SCAN — Dome Fossil / Helix Fossil ] Both dormant. Not Pokémon yet; the pattern of one is asleep in the stone. Treasure-class. Revival requires a reconstruction lab. Nearest capable facility: Cinnabar Island. Note, Host: your friend in the coat mentioned a lab. They were not stealing these to sell. They were shipping them somewhere.
Cinnabar, Adam thought. The shipment. The two grunts in Viridian, low and scared, keeping it quiet until the Cinnabar shipment. He'd filed that away as somebody else's problem. It kept turning out to be his.
He picked up one of the fossils and turned it over. Ancient, a whole animal folded up asleep inside a rock, waiting a few hundred million years for someone with the right machine. He put it in his pocket.
"Hey," the kid in the coat said, then flinched at his own boldness. "Those are, um. Those are technically a scientific find, they belong to—"
"You found them," Adam agreed, and held the other one out to him. "So take yours. Get it to a museum, get your name on it, whatever you science people do." The kid took it with both hands like it might go off. "And when you file the report, tell them Team Rocket was moving fossils to Cinnabar. Say it exactly like that. Somebody who matters will want to hear it."
"Why do you get to keep one?" Ren asked, as they left the kid staring after them.
"Because I want to know what they want it for, but also fossil pokemon can be good." He weighed the fossil in his hand.
"You'd get along with a rock."
"I get along with your Pidgey. Same energy."
Cerulean was blue where Pewter had been grey, a bright water-town of canals and bridges built around a lake so clear it looked fake. After the cave it was like stepping into a postcard. The Mankey squinted at the sky and looked personally offended by how nice it was.
The gym was the strangest one yet. Somebody had turned the battlefield into a stage over a huge glass pool, strung it with lights, and hung a banner that read THE SENSATIONAL SISTERS in glitter that had started to peel. Three young women in matching swimsuits were mid-rehearsal in the water when Adam and Ren walked in, and they surfaced one at a time with the bored grace of people who did this for a living and were a little tired of it.
"Oh," said the tallest one, pushing wet hair back. "Challengers. Ugh. Daisy, it's challengers."
"I can see that, Violet."
"I just think it's rude, is all, we're rehearsing."
They were, it turned out, not really gym leaders in the way Forrest had been a gym leader. They were performers who had been left holding a gym while their little sister was off somewhere, and they battled the way you do a chore, which meant they mostly didn't. Daisy, the oldest, climbed out and looked Adam and Ren over with an appraiser's eye that lingered a lot longer on Ren than on Adam.
"You," she said to Ren. "You've got the look. Have you ever thought about performing? The reach on you, the shoulders, you'd be a natural on the high board."
"I hit things," Ren said.
"She really does," Adam said. He had gone completely unnoticed by three young women in swimsuits, which a younger version of him would have found tragic. This version filed it as accurate and moved on.
Daisy sighed like this was a great waste. "Fine. Cascade Badge. We do a quick one, you take your little pin and go. Violet, you're up. Try, this time."
Violet did not especially try. She sent out a Goldeen, all fins and drama, and Adam sent Beedrill, because the Mankey had been sulking about the sunshine and the water and frankly needed to sit one out. The Beedrill took the pool like it had been waiting its whole short life to be pointed at something. It didn't brawl. It picked the Goldeen apart in fast, clean passes, Twin Needle in and gone before the fish could line up a Water attack, and it moved with that patient, waiting quality Sage had scanned in the forest, a striker that had finally been let off the leash. The Goldeen flopped. Violet shrugged like she'd expected nothing else.
"Cute bee," Daisy allowed. "Your turn, tall and scary."
Ren, who had been called worse and better in one afternoon, sent out the Butterfree, and Adam raised an eyebrow, because the Pidgey would have been the safer pick.
"It needs a win," Ren said, like that explained everything, and it did.
Lily's Staryu came up out of the pool spinning, fast and hard, flinging water like a sprinkler with intent. It was quicker than the Butterfree by a mile. It did not matter. Ren didn't try to out-fly it. She had the Butterfree drift up out of reach, calm as a cloud, and shake a fine shimmer of dust down over the whole stage.
"Sleep Powder," she said, almost fond. "Sweet dreams."
The Staryu's core light stuttered, slowed, and dimmed, and the fast little star sank down onto the stage and went still, fast asleep in a puddle. The Butterfree floated over it looking mildly apologetic. The whole thing took about fifteen seconds and made almost no sound. In Pewter, Ren had won by never being touched. Here she just turned out the lights.
"Okay, that's actually pretty," Lily admitted, fishing her sleeping Staryu out of the water.
Daisy pressed two little teardrop-shaped badges into their hands without ceremony. "Cascade Badges. Congrats, you're very good, please consider synchronized swimming." She was already turning back to the pool. "And tell our sister, if you see a redhead about yea-high with a temper, tell her we said the gym's still standing. Barely."
Outside, in the bright afternoon, Ren turned her Cascade Badge over in her fingers next to the Boulder Badge and frowned.
"That was too easy," she said. "Pewter felt more earned. This one feels like they just gave the badge so we could leave."
"Yeah," Adam said. "Let the easy one be easy. They're not all going to fight you like the forest kid with the plastic sword." He pocketed his own badge. "Two down. And you got your butterfly a win."
The Butterfree was riding the top of Ren's head again, and she reached up and let it climb onto her finger, and some of the grumpiness went out of her.
"It did do well," she admitted.
"It put a Staryu to bed like it was tucking in a toddler. It was terrifying. Nobody will ever fear it and that's the scariest part."
They stayed the night in Cerulean. It was a nice city with a friendly, easy feel to it.
He laid the map out on the windowsill while Ren fed the team on the floor behind him, and traced the line east with one finger. Route 9, then a long dark tunnel through the mountains, then a town on the far side. Rock Tunnel, the map called it, and past it, small and grey, a place called Lavender.
"What's in Lavender?" Ren asked, not looking up. She was refereeing a dispute over food between the Mankey, who believed all food was its food, and the Beedrill, who disagreed with its whole body.
"A tower," Adam said. He kept his voice easy. "Old one. People take their Pokémon there when they die. It's supposed to be haunted." He thought, briefly, about the thing that had been keeping quiet company with him since they arrived. If it wanted him, it knew where he was walking. "No gym. Might be quiet. Might not."
"Ghosts won't run from me, at least," Ren said. "Probably. We'll find out." She separated the Mankey and the Beedrill with the ease of long practice, gave the disputed berry to the Pidgey purely to annoy both of them, and looked up at him with the lamplight on her face. "One more thing about the cave."
"Mm?"
"Thank you."
Adam just smiled.
Ren threw a berry at his head. The Mankey snapped it out of the air and ate it, furious and delighted to have stolen something that wasn't even aimed at it. Outside, the lights came on over the water. They stayed up too late arguing about whose team was better, and lost track of the map entirely, and neither of them minded.
AN: If we get to 300 power stones, I will release an extra chapter on 500, another one. If you wish to support the story and read ahead, visit [email protected]/skeri123