The reporters were waiting outside the hotel at seven in the morning, which Adam had expected, and there were about forty of them.
"Mr Varen! The Pokémon in the final, can you confirm the species?"
"No."
"Is it registered? There's no entry for it in any regional index —"
"I know."
"Where did you catch it?"
"I didn't."
That got them going. Adam stood on the hotel step with his hands in his pockets and let them shout at him for a while, and answered about one question in five.
A woman near the front got closest. She was older than the others and she wasn't shouting.
"You understand that people will come looking," she said. "Not us. Other people."
"I know."
"And you're leaving anyway."
Adam looked at her for a second. She had a good face. He hadn't said a word about leaving to anybody.
"Listen. I will disclose the Pokémon's details and origin through the proper academic channels, once I've confirmed it all with professionals. Until then I won't speak on the matter."
Like hell I will. You'll probably never see me again.
Sage. Give me the details on the Rustboro building.
[ Devon Corporation. Six floors, two sub-levels, three keycard checkpoints, one vault room with a case in it. You have been inside it once. ] A pause. [ Host. You are about to steal from Steven? ]
Umm. It's called long-term borrowing, Sage.
[ I am not objecting. I am noting it. ]
Ok...
Adam told Ren he was going to go and borrow the Key Stone from Steven's company. She didn't like it, but she understood. They didn't have time to waste any more. Steven had all the time in the world and the resources to get another one.
The next day Adam went out alone. Now that he could use his abilities again, the operation was child's play. He teleported straight to Rustboro with Warp Gate, cloaked himself under the Veil, and stepped into the vault where the Key Stone was using Houseguest's Right, because that made no sound and left no trace. As he appeared, he noticed a pair of scientists working on the stone, measuring something with a set of tools.
He waited until they left. And then, Theft.
It came out of the case and into his hand without the glass being opened, and he closed his fingers round it and felt the weight settle.
He stood there for a moment in the dark.
Then he took a page out of his notebook and wrote on it, and left it in the case where the stone had been.
Operation successful. I should leave a note with a hint about where to find a new one. Sage?
[ Affirmative, Host. I do have one location in mind. ]
Good.
Ren was awake when he got back, sitting on the windowsill with her knees up.
"Did you get it?"
He held it up. The colours moved.
"Huh." She looked at it for a while. "Does it work?"
"Don't know. I'm not sure I'm compatible with my Tyranitar yet."
"You should be," Ren said, like it was obvious, and went to make tea.
The Bazaar's terms came through that afternoon while they were packing, and Adam read them twice, looking troubled.
EXTRACTION — TERMS OF DEPARTURE Explorer may carry across: personal effects, marked property, and up to SIX (6) native creatures. The same allowance applies to the second participant. Creatures may not be marked without consent. The choice belongs to them. Anything else remains in-world, permanently.
"Six," Ren said, over his shoulder.
"Yeah."
"You've got nine."
"That's the problem."
Sage. Does the one in my shadow count against it?
[ Affirmative. ]
So it's nine into six.
[ Yes, Host. I am sorry. ]
Is there a way for me to steal the Pokeballs and transfer them that way?
[ There is a possibility. But, Host, would you risk the lives of your Pokémon if something went wrong? ]
No, no I would not.
Ren didn't say anything else. She sat down next to him instead, and they looked at the wall for a while.
"I've got seven," she said eventually. Her voice had gone flat in a way Adam had learned to be careful around. "With the one in the field."
They went to Pallet Town the next morning.
Professor Oak's lab was exactly as it had been the day they registered, a year and a bit ago, two children off a boat with no Pokémon and a borrowed map. He was older and tireder and delighted to see them, and then he saw their faces and stopped being delighted.
"Ah," he said. "You're going somewhere."
"Home," Adam said.
"And you can't take everyone."
"Six each."
Oak nodded slowly. He'd clearly done a version of this conversation before, with people who were not leaving worlds.
"Then bring them out," he said. "All of them. Do it properly and do it outside. And Adam — let them decide. Whatever you're feeling, keep it off your face while they're deciding, because they will read it and they will choose what they think you want."
They did it on the grass behind the lab, in the sun, with the whole field of the professor's Pokémon watching from a distance like a crowd at a wedding.
Adam let all nine of them out.
The Tyranitar sat down, which shook the ground. The Metagross hung in the air. The Gengar sank halfway into the lawn and stayed there with only its head showing, because it thought that was funny. The Zoroark turned into Adam, looked at Adam, and pulled a face. The Lucario stood at his knee. The Beedrill hovered. The Primeape sat with its arms crossed. The Marowak leaned on its club. And his shadow lay out long on the grass, stretching further than it should have.
He told them the truth. All of it, in the plainest words he had. That he came from somewhere else. That he was going back. That six could come and three could not, and that it was not his choice to make, and that whichever way they chose he was not going to argue with them.
Then he shut up and let them think.
The Metagross decided first, and it did not appear to require any time at all. It drifted over and settled beside him.
The Gengar came out of the lawn and went through his legs and reappeared on his other side, grinning, which was as close to a formal statement as it was ever going to get.
The Zoroark followed the Gengar, because they were prank buddies.
The Lucario never moved from his knee. It had hatched in his hands. That question had been answered eight weeks ago on a beach.
The Tyranitar thought about it. Adam watched it think, all seven feet of it, sitting on the grass with its head down. Then it got up and walked over and put its enormous face next to him, the way it had on the black slope, and made the low sound.
That was five.
The Beedrill didn't move like the others.
Adam had caught it as a Weedle in a forest in Viridian. They had spent the year together. It flew over to him first, buzzing, and pointed at the others.
"I understand."
It was telling him that it could not compare to the rest of them in terms of power, or at least that was the gist of it.
It then went away and hovered by the fence. It looked back at him, and Adam understood what it was telling him before it did anything else.
"The forest," he said.
The Beedrill made a small noise.
"Yeah." Adam walked over to it. "That's fair. That's completely fair."
He put his hand out and the Beedrill came down and landed on it, which it had never done, because a Beedrill has three lances and no way to be gentle and it had always known that.
It was very careful.
The Marowak was worse, and Adam had known it would be.
It stood in the middle of the grass with the Thick Club across its shoulder and it looked south-east, in the direction of a town with a tower in it and a graveyard on the hill.
Adam went and crouched in front of it.
"She's still there," he said. "I know."
The Marowak looked at him.
"You don't have to explain it to me. I'd stay too." He put a hand on the side of its skull-helm, on the old bone that had been its mother's. "You were the best one. I want you to know that. Out of everything I picked up in this world, you were the one I'd have fought hardest to keep, and I'm not going to make you choose me over her. You'll be a great guardian for that tower."
The Marowak leaned its forehead against his chest, once, hard enough to hurt.
Then it went and stood by the Beedrill.
The Primeape did not go to the fence.
It came over and stood in front of Adam with its arms crossed and its jaw set, and Adam looked down at the first Pokémon he had ever caught in that world, the furious little goblin that had caught itself out of pride on a hillside outside Viridian, and had learned martial arts because Adam had taught it.
"I'm surprised you don't want to come," Adam said.
The Primeape huffed.
"You got something to prove then."
The Primeape's arms uncrossed, and then it punched Adam, hard, to get the point across.
"You want to be strong enough to beat me?"
"Raaarrrg," it said, loudly.
"Oh, you want to beat everyone. Hah. That's more like it."
Adam crouched down and put his fist out. The Primeape made a fist and put it against his.
"It's a promise my friend, next time we see each other I expect to see you as the strongest, and we can have a proper battle."
The Primeape looked determined, but also sad. Adam felt the same, every parting hurts no matter how tough you are.
Ren's was quieter and much worse to watch.
She had seven and she needed six and the seventh was in a field in this very lab, eating something, entirely unaware, and had been for four months because she'd swapped it out for a Snorunt in the snow and had felt bad about it ever since.
She went and got it herself. She wouldn't let Oak send for it.
The Butterfree came across the grass in that drifting way it had, and landed on her shoulder like nothing had happened at all.
Adam stayed where he was.
He watched Ren Delacroix, who had killed things in four worlds and had never once flinched, sit down cross-legged on the grass and explain to a Butterfree, very carefully and at some length, why it was not coming, and why that was not a punishment, and that the professor was a good man, and that there were other Butterfree here, and that she was sorry.
It listened. Then it put its head against her cheek, as if to comfort her, and flew a slow circle round her head, twice, and went and sat on the fence next to the Beedrill.
Ren stayed sitting on the grass for a bit, eyes teary.
"It's not fair," she said, when Adam came and sat down next to her.
"No."
"I'm going to be angry about this for about ten years." She wiped her face with the heel of her hand, once, efficiently. "Okay. Right. Okay."
Oak wrote them out, one by one, in a book with a real pen.
"Beedrill, Marowak, Butterfree, Primeape. Four. Here."
"They'll be all right?" Ren said.
"They'll be spoiled rotten," Oak said, "and they'll have forty acres and a pond, and about a hundred other Pokémon to boss around, and every single one of them will be told, repeatedly, by me, that they were on the team that won the tournament." He closed the book.
Adam shook his hand and found it harder than he expected.
"Thank you."
"You registered here," Oak said. "Both of you. Two kids with nothing, and I had no starters left and I felt terrible about it." He was smiling. "Best thing I never did, apparently."
"Also, doc. Marowak and Primeape will probably leave, so let them. Same with the Beedrill. They're proud Pokémon with goals of their own, so please let them do their thing."
"Not a problem. Even if they leave, they're registered here, so they can always come back."
After the meeting, Adam and Ren said their last goodbyes to the Pokémon they were leaving, and had a final group hug.
They spent the last afternoon on the hill above Pallet with the six who were coming, doing nothing.
Adam had one thing left to try.
He took the Tyranitarite out of the wrap and put it in his left hand, and the Key Stone in his right, and stood in front of seven feet of green armour on a hillside in the late sun.
Sage. What am I supposed to do.
[ Nobody knows, Host. That is the entire literature. Every account says a version of the same thing, which is that the stones open a door between the trainer and the Pokémon. ]
"Right," Adam said, out loud. "Hey."
The Tyranitar looked down at him.
"You know what this is. You tried to eat it." He held up the Mega Stone. "This is the other half. And apparently it helps you evolve further if our connection is strong enough."
The Tyranitar crouched down and put its head against the Mega Stone.
Nothing happened for a moment.
Then the small stone in his right hand got warm, and the big one in his left got warmer. Adam could feel the connection now clearly.
The Tyranitar came apart at the seams.
Not painfully. Adam had braced for pain and there wasn't any. The armour plates lifted and turned and re-set, the spines came up the back like a range of hills, the jaw got longer and much worse, and the whole thing grew until it blotted out a quarter of the sky from where Adam was standing, and the sand came off it in a wall that flattened the grass for thirty metres in every direction.
It roared once.
Every bird in the valley left.
"Okay," Ren said, from behind him, in the tone of a woman making a note. "Okay. That's a lot."
It lasted about four minutes. Then the light went out of it and it came back down to seven feet and stood there breathing hard. It looked extremely pleased with itself in a way that was very slightly ruined by the fact that it immediately sat down.
Adam put both stones away.
"So that's what that does," he said.
The extraction was set for dawn.
They did not tell anyone. They sat on the beach waiting with their Pokémon.
The sea came in and went out. The six of them sat on the sand in the grey light.
EXPEDITION COMPLETE — L1-0631 Duration: 383 days (extended). Dilation 10:1.
MISSION ASSESSMENT
D — Live in the world thirty days. CLEARED
C — Catch your first Pokémon. CLEARED
B — Be recognised as a trainer. Earn one badge. CLEARED
A — Break a syndicate moving against the region. CLEARED
S — Stand at the top of the ladder the locals climb. CLEARED
SPECIAL QUEST
(1) No active abilities for the duration. UPHELD.
(2) Catch a legendary or mythical. CLEARED.
HIDDEN OBJECTIVES
The orphan sheltered. The mother laid down. The syndicate broken without a single death.
RATING: S
+26,000 NP → balance 60,000
The bay in Kerenth was cold and smelled of ozone and floor polish. There were four people waiting on the pad, and Adam had forgotten how much he liked all of them.
Brandt got there first and stopped dead about six feet away.
"There is," he said carefully, "a very large animal behind you."
"Uhm."
"Adam."
"It's fine. It's had breakfast."
Sophie came round Brandt at a run and hugged Ren, and then stopped and looked at the Gardevoir standing quietly behind her, and the Gardevoir inclined its head. Sophie made a noise that Henrik would repeat back to her for years.
"Thirty-eight days," Brandt said. "You've been gone thirty-eight days."
"We've been gone a year and a bit."
"A long time." He rubbed his face. "You look well. Both of you look well. That's the disconcerting part. You were away for a long time, we were starting to get worried."
"We had a great time," Ren added with a smile. "And we made some great friends." She turned around, looking at their Pokémon.
"And got an S-rank clear," Adam added.
Behind him the Tyranitar took an interest in a structural pillar.
"Do not," Adam said, without turning round.
It stopped.
They took the whole lot up to Floor 40 that evening, because there was nowhere else to put them and because Ren refused to leave any of them in a ball on their first day home.
Henrik came up with food. Mirelle had been told, and would be coming soon.
The Gengar found the vents inside four minutes.
The Lucario sat by the window and looked out at a city with no forest in it, no sea, no mountain, wondering.
At some point in the evening Adam realised the shadow under the table was deeper than it should have been, and had been for a while.
"Yeah," he said quietly. "We're home, darky."
Ren was about to say something when somewhere behind them in the dark of the apartment there was a crunch, and then a pause, and then a second, more confident crunch.
"That's the coffee table," Ren said.
"That's definitely the coffee table."
Adam got up to go and stop his new house pet from destroying the house.