The Vermilion gym had a desk by the door and a bored kid behind it with a stack of forms.
They filled them in. Trainer number, badges held, region of registration, preferred format. The kid stamped both sheets, told them the leader took challenges at eleven and three, and to come back at three because eleven was full.
They came back at three.
Lt. Surge was a large man in a sleeveless shirt who had clearly been doing this a long time and had stopped being impressed by anything sometime before Adam was born. He read the sheet the kid handed him without much interest.
Then he looked up, and saw the Larvitar sitting on Adam's side.
"What is that."
"Larvitar."
"I've never seen one." He came around the desk to look at it properly, and the Larvitar looked back with the flat indifference it applied to most people. "Where's it from?"
"The mountains west of here. Past the border."
"Huh." Surge straightened up. "And the floating one on the way in? The steel thing?"
"Further out. You'd have to take a boat."
"Right." He looked at Adam a moment longer, and Adam could see him deciding that this was going to be either interesting or a waste of an afternoon, and that he didn't much care which. "Three-on-three, my house, my rules. Referee's the kid. Try not to break my floor."
He led with the Raichu.
It didn't last long. In the last battle Adam used the Marowak, because Ground is immune to Electric and because it had been a long boat trip for the Marowak. The Raichu never landed a clean shot.
Surge watched the whole thing without saying much. When it was over he collected his Raichu, told it that it had done fine, and handed the badge over.
"You've fought a lot," he said. It wasn't a compliment or an insult.
"You can say that."
"I see." He jerked his chin at the door. "Go on. Take the girl too, she's been standing there looking bored for ten minutes."
Ren beat him in about the same time with her Weavile, which he had also never seen, and which he watched with a lot more attention than he'd watched the Marowak.
That was how the next stretch went. Three gyms in eleven days.
Celadon was a garden under glass, all perfume and green light, and Erika was so polite about losing that it took Adam a while to notice she was also extremely annoyed. The Beedrill took her Vileplume apart. The Poison in it blunted the Bug a little, so it took longer than it should have, but not much longer.
Fuchsia was more interesting. Koga was interesting, and half his gym was fake walls. Ren got genuinely angry at a corridor. Adam's Metang solved the maze in about four minutes by ignoring the walls entirely and reading the shape of the building from above, which Koga described afterwards as "an unusual approach." Psychic goes through Poison. It was over quickly after that.
"Three in a week and a half," Ren said, on the road south. "This is embarrassing for everyone."
"They are good. We're just not sixteen anymore."
"The tournament will be fun." She was flipping the Soul Badge like a coin. "Two left."
Two left. Cinnabar and Viridian.
Cinnabar was an island with a volcano on it and a research lab at the foot. Adam had two reasons to be there.
The first was Blaine, who ran the gym under the mountain and made you answer riddles before he'd fight you, which Ren refused to do on principle and Adam did anyway because he liked riddles. Blaine's Magmar was genuinely strong. The Larvitar still won. Rock through Fire, and by now the Larvitar was the size of a small bear, and it hit like a falling building.
Seven badges.
The second reason was the shipment.
He'd been carrying it since Viridian. The fossil.
The lab took his Mt. Moon fossil and nearly wept over it. The head researcher, a tired woman with burns on her forearms, turned it over twice and asked where he'd got it. Adam told her the truth. He watched her face change.
"We've had four go missing this year," she said. "Off manifests. The paperwork's always perfect."
"Originally I wanted to take a look at this issue but my schedule is filled up. Report this to the authorities. Find who signed off on this and I will help you catch them."
Later that same week the Team Rocket operation on the island was defeated and imprisoned.
Next few weeks they didn't do the final gym but Adam's focus was on evolving his team.
The Metang went first, and it did it in the least dramatic way possible.
They were playing chess and Adam was cheating a bit. It had beaten him eleven games straight over the last month, and on the twelfth it was getting heated up, for the first time it was losing, then it stopped, mid-decision, and the whole board slid two inches sideways on the rock.
Adam looked up.
The light came off it hard enough that he had to put a hand up. When it subsided, the thing hanging over his chess set was massive. The Metang was gone. In front of him, floating, was a Metagross. Huge and majestic.
It settled onto the sand. The rock cracked under it.
Then it finished the game.
"Damn. Evolution mid-game. That's new." Ren said, from the water.
"Yeah," Adam had a shit eating grin on his face. He was happy about the new powerhouse of his team. He was starting to worry since none of his Pokémon had evolved for the remainder of the year. No matter how many battles they fought, nothing happened. So his idea of challenging them in other ways was correct. For Metang that was playing against Sage.
The Zorua evolved in the middle of a prank, which was the only way it was ever going to happen.
It was trying to imitate Ren for the longest time, but it could never fool Adam. Every day it would adapt and change, making the illusions better and better.
Finally after a month of grueling practice it succeeded. Adam was going for a swim in the sea when he spotted Ren sunbathing. He didn't notice anything off so he continued. Just as he got into the water the Ren on the beach started screaming holding her stomach, Adam quickly jumped out rushing to check on her. As he got there he tried to pick her up and rush to the Hospital when his hands passed through her head. It was at this moment he realized he just got pranked. His face went dark.
At the same time Adam was about to blow up, a blinding light shone from the illusion and Zorua evolved, expanding in size. It became a brand new Zoroark. While this lessened Adam's rage a bit, he still beat up his mischievous Pokémon.
The Haunter was the one Adam couldn't do anything about, and it went and sorted itself out.
There was a burned-out house on the north end of the island. A big one, three storeys, gutted by fire a long time ago and never pulled down, with the roof open to the sky and a lot of paperwork still rotting on the floors. Locals didn't go near it. Adam asked in the town and got the same answer three times in three different tones, which was that the place was full of ghosts and had been since before anyone's grandmother.
The Haunter found it on their second night and started going back.
It was gone every night after that. It came home before dawn, every time, pleased with itself in the specific way that meant it had been frightening something. Adam let it. A ghost wants ghost company, and it had spent a year as the only one of its kind on a team of things with legs.
On the eleventh night it didn't come back.
Adam went in at four in the morning with the Metagross throwing light ahead of him and found it on the second floor, in a room with no ceiling left.
There was something in there with it.
Adam never got a clean look. It wasn't a Pokémon, or it wasn't only one, and it had a shifting shape, like a human ghost. The air in the room was moving in a way air doesn't. Sage went very quiet in his head and then said, carefully, that she would prefer he did not go further in.
The Haunter was between it and the door. He looked focused, serious even.
The light came off it hard enough to throw his shadow up the wall behind him.
When it stopped there was something standing on the floorboards. Not floating. Standing, on two feet, squat and solid and grinning, with a spine and a shadow of its own.
The thing in the room went out like a lamp.
Seems like the evolution of a Haunter to Gengar had something to do with a human soul.
After the evolution it was back to its shenanigans.
It went through the floor out of pure showing off, came up in front of him, and made him walk into it. Twice.
Right. Still you, then.
Ren was awake when they got back to the room, sitting up with a blanket around her.
"It got big."
"And round." Adam added.
"Does it still do the boots thing?"
Adam looked down. His boots, which he had left by the door, were on the table.
"Yes," he said.
The Larvitar was next.
Adam had been feeding it pretty much everything on the island for two weeks by then. There was a black slope on the north side where the old lava had come down and cooled into something with a lot of metal in it, and the Larvitar had found it on their second day and had been going back every morning like a man going to work.
It went up a size. Then it went up a size again.
On the seventeenth day it stopped eating halfway through a mouthful, and stood there with its head down, and the ground under it started to hum.
"Adam." Ren said as she stood up.
"I see it."
The first change took about four seconds and there was no light involved at all, which surprised him. The shell just closed. It hardened over the limbs and the face until what was standing on the slope was a rigid grey thing with two eyes and no arms, sealed shut, humming like a transformer.
Then it launched itself sixty metres up the slope and hit a boulder hard enough that Adam felt it through his boots.
"It turned into a boulder," Ren said, laughing. "It's an angry rock. It's a rock with a grudge."
"Just you laugh Ren, you will see what it becomes soon enough."
The Pupitar spent three days like that. It could not eat, which it hated, and it could not hit things properly, which it hated more, so it dealt with the situation by throwing itself at the mountain repeatedly at an appalling speed until the mountain stopped being a problem.
On the third night the shell came apart.
Adam had been half expecting it and was still not ready. The thing that came out of the casing on the black slope was seven feet of green armour plate and it kept unfolding after Adam thought it had finished. Spines down the back. A jaw that could take a door off a car. Small red eyes that found him immediately in the dark and stayed there.
The sand around it started to lift. Not wind. The air itself had turned gritty, a fine dry storm coming up off its body and rolling out across the slope.
Ren, who had faced down things from other worlds without blinking, took one step back.
"Okay," she said. "Okay, that's what you meant."
"That's what I meant."
The Tyranitar looked down at Adam from a considerable height. Then it lowered its head, put its enormous face next to him, and made the same low sound it had been making since it was the size of a dog and he had been prying red-brown minerals out of cracks for it with a knife.
Adam put a hand on the side of its jaw.
"Yeah," he said. "You got big."
Sage.
[ It is not finished, Host. That is the important part. This is a Tyranitar. Its real growth starts now. ]
I know.
[ I merely note that the Mega Stone in your bag currently has no Key Stone, and no bond deep enough to fire it, but from the looks of it you wont need it. The Tyranitar is already very imposing. ]
The Riolu was last, and it was the only one Adam couldn't engineer.
The others had needed food, or fighting, or a mystical encounter. This one needed something he could not schedule, and he knew it. He spent two weeks deliberately not thinking about it in case thinking about it counted as cheating.
So he just did what he'd been doing. Carried it. Fed it. Let it play and fight. He did his morning forms with the Primeape while it sat in the sand and tried to copy the footwork with legs that were not remotely ready for it. Talked to it about nothing.
On the last morning on the island the sun came up over the water, and the Riolu was on his shoulder, and it fell off, and Adam caught it as usual.
It didn't come back up.
It stood in his hands and looked at him with an expression that had nothing puppyish in it at all, and then it went bright. It got heavier, and Adam had to change his grip and then had to put it down entirely because it was suddenly rather a lot to hold.
The Lucario that stood up on the sand was still small for a Lucario. It would grow. But it came up onto its feet without wobbling once, and it looked at its own hands and then at Adam.
Something went through the air between them. Not a sound. Adam had spent two years without Observation Haki and had stopped expecting to feel anything like it again, and here it came anyway, off a creature that had hatched in a bunk on a boat eight weeks ago.
Riley had said it plainly on a dock in the cold, over tea. Something you raise from an egg comes out closer to you than anything you'll ever catch in a ball.
"Yeah," Adam said. "All right."
Ren was standing further up the beach with her coffee, not saying anything, which was her being extremely loud about it.
"Don't," Adam said.
"I didn't say a word."
"You were going to."
"I was going to say that you finally got the thing Steven was blabbing about."
He counted them on the boat over.
Primeape. Beedrill. Marowak. Gengar. Zoroark. Metagross. Tyranitar. Lucario. And the one that didn't like the ball and didn't need counting.
Not one of them one step short of anything. Every single one of them finished, or as finished as their line went, for the first time since he'd walked into this world.
Now we go and beat up the guy that made Marowak cry.
The Viridian Gym looked exactly like it had a year ago.
It had been closed for eight months, according to a sign, and the sign was a lie, because the lights were on. Adam had walked past this building before. He knew better now.
The man inside was in a suit and had a Persian at his feet. He did not look like a man whose organisation had lost forty-one people in a week, because that was exactly what happened when the police raided the island. He looked like a man doing paperwork.
"You're the trainer," Giovanni said.
"Yes."
"No. You're the one." He set down his pen. "Do you know that not one person who works for me knows your name? Not one. I asked. That takes some doing, and I wanted you to know I noticed." He came around the desk. "Mt. Moon. Then Lavender. Then my people on the shore across from here. Then two quiet weeks, and then every account I own comes open at once."
"You moved children's fossils and dead Pokémon's skulls for money."
"I moved commodities."
"You had a Marowak killed in a graveyard." Adam let that sit there. "Its child is on my team. It's here."
Giovanni looked at him for a while.
"Eight badges gets you into the tournament," he said, at last. "Seven does not. You want the Earth Badge. That depends on defeating me. While usually I would not bother and delay this so you miss the tournament I will make an exception this time." He gestured at the arena floor. The lights came up over it. The Persian stood and stretched. "So let's both get what we want. Full six."
Adam picked his six on the walk in. Marowak first, because the Marowak had earned this one. Then Gengar, Zoroark, Metagross, Primeape. Tyranitar last.
Marshadow stayed where it was.
Not you. Not for him.
He was better than everyone Adam had fought in this world except Steven, and it did not help him at all.
The first exchange told Adam everything. Giovanni sent a Nidoqueen that had clearly been doing this for a decade, and it was fast. It went straight for the Marowak's legs. The Marowak took the hit on purpose to get inside its reach and put the club through its jaw. It didn't wait to be told. Adam hadn't opened his mouth.
"Ah," Giovanni said quietly, and Adam knew he'd seen it. Not the power. The fact that nobody had given an order.
He was good. He put the Marowak down in the end with a Rhydon twice its size. Adam recalled it and let it rest, it had done its part.
After that it stopped being a battle and started being a demonstration.
The Gengar demolished the Rhydon. At this stage it was a true menace. It was much faster and its attacks were like grenades every time they hit. Next up was the Dugtrio. Half of what it does comes up out of the ground, and the Gengar never touched the ground, so half of it was wasted. It was still a tough battle. This Pokémon was noticeably better. Still, in the end, a barrage of shadow balls brought it down. It got clipped by a stone edge and stayed standing. Adam decided to retrieve it and send Zoroark.
Giovanni sent out Nidoking next.
The Zoroark walked out as a second Persian. Giovanni's actual Persian, sitting at his heel, put its ears flat and hissed at it, and in the half-second Giovanni spent looking at his own cat, the illusion came apart and something with a red mane took his Nidoking off its feet.
"That's not a Kanto species," Giovanni said.
"No."
"No." He recalled the Nidoking. He was looking at Adam differently now. "Kangaskhan."
Adam followed up by switching the Zoroark with Primeape.
Before the red light even faded it ran straight at the Kangaskhan. The Kangaskhan caught it with a sucker punch. The punch only made it angrier. When it came in close it unleashed Close Combat unloading its fury into the giant Pokémon, mixing punches, kicks and chops.
That was four.
Next Adam recalled Primeape and sent out his Metagross.
Giovanni sent the Nidoking back out, still standing, still angry. The two giants looked at each other.
"Interesting, those are very rare and dangerous."
Metagross observed his opponent, dissecting it with its eyes. After its analysis was completed it floated as high as it could charging a psychic move. Adam recognised it as Zen Headbutt. Meanwhile Nidoking had used earthquake, but with the Metagross in the air there was nothing on the ground to hit. Giovanni immediately ordered it to use stone edge but it was already too late. The Metagross came down like a comet, smashing to the raised rocks and plowing the Nidoking into the ground. The whole arena shook.
Giovanni didn't look surprised. Next he ordered his Persian onto the floor.
Adam followed the tradition and switched, this time using Tyranitar.
Giovanni was stunned. If a Metagross was rare, this was something else entirely. At least at this point in time.
"Would you be willing to trade that Pokémon? I can offer anything you want."
"Keep dreaming, let's finish this. Buddy, show them what a real earthquake looks like."
As the sandstorm raged in the arena a stomp was made and the ground shook. The walls of the arena cracked, Giovanni could barely stand on his feet, his eyes wide. The arena started parting. Huge fissures appeared. Rocks were launched up from the ground like small mountains. An absolute cataclysm. The Persian took the full force of the attack and got knocked out, without any possibility of dodging.
"You still held back buddy, no need to do so against this guy." Adam added.
The Tyranitar huffed.
"Impressive, a year ago you were nobody, but look at you now" he said. "I had a report on you in March. Two youngsters off a boat, no sponsors, no records. I threw it away."
"Yeah."
"That was the error, then." He crossed the floor and held out the Earth Badge, and Adam took it, and Giovanni did not let go of it immediately. "The organisation is finished. You understand that. I am not dumb enough to push further. A lot of our members were taken in that last operation. There isn't a version of this where I rebuild. I hear there is a task force assigned to hunt me down."
"I know."
"Then I'll tell you one more thing." He let go. "There are far worse things out there than Team Rocket. You have something far more valuable to them than you know." Giovanni was looking at his shadow. "Shame I didn't see it."
"Better for you."
Giovanni just pulled another badge, threw it to Ren, and left.
The League came for him eleven days later, in a different city. Adam read about it on a train and didn't feel much of anything at all. The Lucario read it over his arm, which it had started doing, and gave no sign of understanding a word.
Eight badges.
They sat on the roof of the Viridian Pokémon Center that night with the whole team out and a bag of terrible convenience-store food between them. Ren counted her own badge case twice because she liked the sound.
"Eight," she said. "Both of us. In a year, minus a vacation, plus a volcano."
"Plus a mountain."
"Plus a mountain." She threw a chip at the Primeape, who caught it in its mouth without looking. "So that's the syndicate broken and the badges done and one thing left."
"We are ready."
The tournament was in nineteen days. Somewhere in that bracket was a kid from Pallet Town he'd been curious about for a year.
"You're doing the face," Ren said.
"What face."
"The one where you're about to say something dramatic about a tournament."
"I was going to say we should leave early and get a hotel with a swimming pool."
"See, that's much better." She lay back on the roof tiles. "Say more things like that."
Below them the Tyranitar started eating the parapet, and the whole building made a noise, and Adam got up to go and deal with that.
The Lucario got up too, and came with him, without being asked.
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