All posts by Damon Sasi

Relationship Advice

Cleanliness Orientation


For Alice, a clean home means it’s been dusted, vacuumed, and window-wiped sometime in the past week, with all the dirty laundry in their hamper and all the clean clothes already folded and put away, no dishes in the sink, no visible garbage poking out the top of cans, and no visible stains anywhere.

For Bob, a “clean home” isn’t incompatible with having some clothes draped on furniture (but not the floor), some dishes in the sink and some garbage in bags by the door; he’ll take them out all together at some point soon. The bed doesn’t need to be made, the bookshelf doesn’t need to be dusted… that stuff’s just extra work.

For Carol, as long as nothing is rotting or liable to trip someone, it’s “good enough.” Sure, it may not be “clean,” but it’s livable and safe and with two kids and a dog running around that’s all she feels she’s got the energy for. She may do some extra cleaning if guests are coming over, but she doesn’t stress about it day to day.

David doesn’t have kids or a dog, he’s just not bothered by the state of his home. He works 10+ hours a day, and spends most of his time at home in bed, watching TV, or on the computer. The pile of dirty laundry by the door and the stain on the couch aren’t hurting anyone, nor is the perpetual pile of dirty dishes in the sink; he rinses them first, after all, and he can clean them as he needs them.

And still others live with the perpetual stink of pet urine that’s steeped into the carpet, boxes of junk crowding the halls and living spaces, and other stuff that makes a therapist called to the house for crisis intervention go “Oh…”

But let’s put that last category aside. Even within the range of what would generally be considered “normal,” whether you’re the kind of person who feels a need to scrub the toilet every week, the kind of person who is now wondering when the last time they scrubbed their toilet was, or somewhere between, the chances that you’ll end up sharing your living space or life with someone who has exactly the same ideas of clean as you are fairly small.

Of course “exactly the same” isn’t necessary. Most people can get along okay as long as they fall within the same general range of turnover for chores.

But deeply ingrained in all of us is a sense of what “clean,” “fine,” or “messy” looks like, feels like, smells like. And it’s not just a matter of taste or preference; something about our nature and nurture have instilled a sense of normalcy to certain environments. The affordance widths tend to be lopsided toward cleanliness, as most people are comfortable in environments cleaner than their baseline, but if it goes too far it can still be stressful (if that seems weird to you, imagine the feeling of being in a very rich stranger’s mansion and being told to make yourself at home while every move you make is under careful watch).

How does the orientation frame help?

I can’t count how many times I’ve observed or experienced the following type of interaction:

Bob: I thought you were going to clean the kitchen last night?

Alice: Uh… I did?

Bob: The top of the fridge wasn’t dusted.

Alice: Well I didn’t know you wanted me to do that.

Bob: Can you do it now?

Alice: It feels pointless. No one’s regularly going up there for anything.

Bob: It’s still bad for our health to have dust build up in the house.

Alice: Says who?

Bob: *googles it* See?

Alice: *googles it too* No, look, see?!

In reality, a google war isn’t a bad outcome; at least the question is being put to some objective measure, and evidence might even soften one or the other’s position. If Bob is Alice’s parent, the answer in most cases is “Because I said so.”

Assuming research is brought into it, however, what Bob might discover is that regardless of what the research says, he can’t actually feel comfortable unless the fridge is dusted, while Alice discovers that also regardless of the research, the risk is so small that the hassle of getting a footstool and wiping the top of the fridge still feels like an onerous and pointless chore. 

But “This is a pointles chore” is different from “This is making X happy,” and even that is different from “This is making X comfortable.” Recognizing that the issue is more important for one person than the other can short-cut the debate entirely.

Of course it might raise a more important point: whose responsibility is it to appease Bob’s orientation? Again, if Bob is the parent, the default is probably going to be “everyone’s.” If they’re roommates, Bob might feel bad asking others to accommodate him if the thing he needs feels too far outside the “expected norm.” That might also apply to a romantic relationship, though Alice might also accommodate Bob knowing he would do the same for her.

It can also be tempting to think “Well it’s not a lot of effort, really, especially compared to cleaning the whole kitchen. Why make a big deal about it?” But doing a chore that feels necessary vs one that doesn’t can have a huge impact on motivation, and when it comes to something that needs even more regular maintenance, like making the bed, or affects the way you live day to day, like eating somewhere besides the table, conforming entirely to another person’s preferences in every way can be a very onerous ask.

For some people the idea that how clean a house should be is as “important” as whether or not the relationship is monogamous or how involved extended family is silly, and I’m not necessarily saying they’re wrong. Most people find it much less important, both on an emotional and a consequential level. Not all orientations are created equal, and cleanliness is much closer to the “preference” side of the spectrum than extended family, let alone sexuality.

But if you consider how consistently your living environment will be around you day to day, it can be a bit easier to see why this is something that can be important to use the orientation lens on, and why the expectation that others “just relax” or “just do more” can miss the mark on what they’re actually asking of each other.

Relationship Advice

Extended Family Orientation


In an ideal world, everyone comes from lovely, supportive families that accept whoever they marry and get along with their new in-laws and respect the couple’s boundaries and wishes for how their children will be raised.

Unfortunately, in the real world, many people want little or nothing to do with their families once they’re adults, in-laws regularly make snide or condescending comments whenever they visit, and statistically speaking your own parents probably don’t respect your boundaries, let alone those of your partner.

Some people have great relationships with their family, and don’t understand how anyone could not want to visit on holidays or have grandparents involved in child rearing. Others get along okay with their parents while recognizing their flaws, but feel awkward about how adamantly their spouse dislikes them, or vice-versa. Bad enough if holidays are the only times tensions rise; what if you live near one or both sets of parents? Can they drop in any time? Who’s responsible for telling them they can’t, if someone’s not comfortable with that?

Unlike sexual or romantic orientation, I believe family orientation is mostly the result of nurture rather than nature. Some cultures, particularly Western ones, are very individualistic; “I married you, not your family” is a phrase you might hear fairly often in couples counseling. But other cultures have a very strong family orientation, such that it’s taken for granted that multiple generations will live together; when you marry someone, you are in a very real sense joining their family, not just creating a new independent unit.

In addition to the effects of culture are the effects of upbringing. A loving and nurturing family will make it easy for people to want to involve family in their lives even after they grow older and start their own. A mixed upbringing or family with some good and bad members or memories may make some extended enmeshment feel acceptable, but not too much. And a traumatic upbringing will make people want to never see their family again, or (sadly often) feel guilted into doing so by those family members or their culture while continuing to suffer… though it might make someone very happy to spend time with their partner’s family, if it’s less dysfunctional.

There are some real, hard questions that need to be answered in this space. Not just how involved in potential children’s lives will they be or how often you’ll visit whose family, but also how will you care for family members if they get old/sick? Will they live with you? How much will you be expected to bend to family’s preferences vs standing firm on your own? How much should you contribute to bailing family out of poor financial decisions? How much is “appropriate” to tell your family about your relationship?

When two people have very different orientations on this it can cause endless drama, and that gets worse if one side’s family is actually abusive or manipulative in ways that they’re used to and find hard to notice.

How does the orientation frame help?

Communication and clear expectations are key to navigating these issues in general, and just speaking your preference and inviting your partner’s perspective on how much or little you prefer extended family be involved in the new family you create together can be very valuable.

Some people are very open about this (“If my family doesn’t like you we have a problem,” or “I don’t want to see my family ever again”), and if that’s the case, respecting those orientations is important. It isn’t necessarily mutual; some people are okay with their partner’s family but not their own, might even prefer them. But respecting your partner’s boundaries when it comes to family involvement, particularly their own, can head off a lot of difficulties.

This is an orientation where change is possible to some degree, because it’s predicated in large part on extrinsic factors. Most people would want supportive, loving, interesting people in their life. Most people do not want selfish, hurtful, boring people in their life, but will make an exception for family because they’ve been conditioned to think it’s okay or normal. If you notice your partner’s orientation is very closed to extended family involvement, noticing why that might be the case can be very useful; if it’s something that can be changed, changing it might help their orientation soften. 

But don’t try to change their mind without at least recognizing the cause of it, and notice that the frame of “orientation” still points to something intrinsic; even with perfectly fine and positive family members on both sides, some people are more private than others, or more introverted, or more independent. 

Relationship Advice

Romantic Orientation


Most people think of sexual orientations as pretty straightforward: hetero/homo/bi/pan/asexuality may exist on more of a scale than as fixed points,  and many people, particularly older ones, are confused about some of them, but at least conceptually it’s understood what someone means when they say “sexual orientation.”

I think “romantic orientation” would be a beneficial frame to normalize as well. While non-monogamous people don’t face the same level of hardship as those of non-heterosexual orientation, there are many similarities. Like heterosexuality, monogamy is the “default” expectation of most people, and many friends or family, particularly religious ones, will judge someone who is open about having anything but an exclusive orientation. Many polyamorous people tend to hide their true selves to fit in with a society that would not legally recognize their relationships, and, particularly in more puritanical times, pretend to be monogomous, as would be expected of them. Aromantic people, like asexuals, struggle with flip sides of the same social expectation: that romance and sex should be intrinsically linked.

And good luck finding media portrayals of things like polyamory, let alone positive ones; at best you’ll see swingers, open relationships, or harems, all of which are different romantic orientations, and all of which lead to blurred lines and misunderstandings about what people who are not monogamously oriented want. Even bringing up that you feel romantic love for more than one person could cause massive stress, anxiety, and jealousy in monogamous partners, and scare off any who don’t have the same orientation.

To clarify here for those unaware, polyamory is specifically the feeling of romantic love for multiple people. There’s a wide range of how this manifests and how polyamorous relationships can work in practice, but it’s more than just having a consensual open relationship where either person can have sex with other people.

But the point is that “open relationship” is also an orientation, as much as monogamy is, or polyamory. This is distinctly different from simply a life of perpetually dating multiple people: many couples specifically want a partner who they can live with, raise a family with, and build their life around, but also enjoy flirting, dating, and sleeping with others.

I’ve spoken to many friends and clients who realized they were some form of non-monogamous fairly late in life, and always there’s a sort of shock in the self-awakening, followed (for those who were already in monogamous relationships) by fear and sadness about their partner or spouse’s reaction if they found out. Some of these relationships endured through omission, others adapted once the truth came out, and of course some broke apart as people realized their relationship orientation did not match.

Another parallel to sexual orientation is that romantic orientation exists on a spectrum. There are some people who are “bi-romantic,” so to speak, who note different tradeoffs between a monogamous relationship and polyamorous one, but can be happy in either. These people might still not enjoy an open relationship, however… someone who would be happy in basically any romantic relationship type, though they may still prefer certain relationships based on the people involved, would be “panromantic”

How does the orientation frame help?

Knowing your orientation can be useful when you’re trying to figure out what makes you happy. People often experiment before they figure it out, and some people feel pressured into trying relationship types they don’t actually fit in… most commonly monogamous ones, of course, but sometimes open or polyamorous ones. And some people compromise as best they can; I know a couple where one person is monogamous and the other is open-but-with-primary. It’s genuinely difficult for the open person to reduce how much they have sex outside the relationship, but they make an effort to restrict it for their partner’s sake. The mono person tried dating others as well and ended up preferring exclusivity, but is okay with their partner having an occasional fling as long as they feel the commitment to their relationship is maintained.

Still, the mono person finds it hard to talk to friends or family about their relationship, since they know it would invite a lot of dislike toward their partner or even judgement toward themself for “allowing” it; to many people, particularly of older generations, the very idea of consensual-non-monogamy is a myth, and those who engage in it can be seen as immoral on one end or being taken advantage of on the other. And so having to be deceptive to people they care about is an additional strain, as is having to be careful what they say in the workplace or on social media.

Needless to say, both people are very emotionally mature, self-aware, and open to communicating honestly about how they feel and what they can do to help each other be more comfortable. If one of them took the approach of “why can’t you just stop going on dates with others” or “why don’t you just go on more dates yourself,” or even blamed themselves for not being able to change who they or their partner were, the relationship would never have survived as long as it has.

Another two people I know have struggled to maintain monogamous relationships throughout their lives. What finally clicked for them, one through self-discovery and the other through extensive conversation and self-reflection, was a harem-style relationship, where they felt comfortable being in the role of, in one’s case, the head of the household, and in the other’s, part of a romantic group without the more high-maintenance demands of being anyone’s “primary.”

A bisexual friend of mine realized they might not ever be happy in a monogamous relationship because it would mean cutting off a whole “part” of them and the sorts of experiences they  craved, but was afraid to talk to their partner about it because they know of that stereotype/worry that people have when dating someone bisexual. It wasn’t until they realized this went deeper than a simple desire to have sex with different people that they stopped trying to fit into a mold that didn’t fit them, and had a “second coming out,” but there are other bisexual people who stay happily married in monogamous relationships for life, because monogamy is their relationship orientation.

Words have power. They are the main form our thoughts take, the primary way we make sense of our intuitions and feelings and desires and fears, and share them with each other. Of all the things I think should be treated and spoken about as orientations instead of preferences, this feels like the most important one.

Relationship Advice

Orientations


(Note: these articles refer largely to normative modern western culture. When I say “most people” or “most relationships,” I’m speaking descriptively, not prescriptively. There are absolutely exceptions to all of it, and if you’re in one of those, or in a subculture in which that exception is the norm, I don’t want to give the impression that there’s anything wrong with that)

One of the things I’ve noticed after nearly a decade of therapy is that the word “preference” seems insufficiently strong for a lot of things people want that nevertheless don’t rise to the level of being called a need. For most people, not getting their preferred ice cream flavor won’t ruin an otherwise good day, but for some, coming home to find dishes in the sink and laundry on the floor can make the world feel like it’s falling apart.

This becomes most clear in relationship counseling, where two or more people are trying to live together and accommodate each other’s desires while having their own respected. On some level we know “I prefer a clean home” is not the same as “I prefer vanilla ice cream,” but people don’t often consider how this difference in intensity-of-preferences can impact relationships when they’re unaligned.

On the other hand, there are some “preferences” we generally understand to be inflexible and important. Asking a heterosexual person to enjoy intercourse with someone of the same sex, or asking a pansexual person to only enjoy porn involving heterosexual pairings, would be considered not just rude but basically impossible. In extreme situations someone might try to enjoy something they don’t, or have a physical reaction while being mentally uncomfortable, and this would generally be understood to be tragic.

That brings us to a commonly used word that is generally understood to mean more than simple preference: “orientation.”

I’ve found that a lot of difficulties people have in relationships come from treating things more like preferences than orientations. To be clear, even this is a spectrum. There are clusters on the far ends which can easily be labeled one or the other, but any sort of comprehensive universal list is impossible.

What we can do is notice the sorts of things that are more useful to treat as orientations. Here’s the list of things I believe most people in relationships explicitly and consciously treat this way:

  1. Attraction (sexual orientation included as implicit)
  2. Children (how many, and usually a rough idea of of when they’ll be had)
  3. Career (roughly how much money each person is expected to make/how many hours worked)
  4. Religion (decreasingly, but many would still end a marriage if their partner came out as atheist or converted to a different faith)
  5. Politics (increasingly, particularly among younger folk; “swipe left if you voted for X.”)

To some degree this feels like a good summary of the sorts of “impersonal” things it makes sense to be explicit and upfront about with your partners as deal-breakers.

But when we dig deeper into the day-to-day lives of those in relationships to observe the sorts of things that cause ongoing conflict, we see more. Here’s an incomplete list of what I believe people implicitly and often unconsciously treat this way:

  1. Pets (how many and what kind)
  2. Living location (assuming you will live together)
  3. Extended family (how involved will they be)
  4. Diet (Increasingly common for vegetarians and vegans)
  5. Cleanliness (both hygiene and home)
  6. Relationship type (Monogamy vs some form of open or poly. Some make this explicit, but for most people a monogamy is the unquestioned assumption)

Some of those may seem a bit absurd to put in the same bucket as questions like “should we have kids or not,” but consider how upset someone might be if their partner of many years suddenly decided that they didn’t want to have pets anymore. If that’s too easy (it likely feels synonymous for pet owners), what if over the course of a year your partner came to the inescapable conclusion that they want to live totally off the grid? Some people might be open to such changes or try to adapt. For most, this would end the relationship.

So, when I use the word “orientations,” what I’m referring to are preferences which have a high cost to ignore, and in most cases are unlikely to quickly change. Some people legitimately cannot relax, cannot find mental peace, if their environment doesn’t meet a certain level of cleanliness… and if two people have a substantial difference in what they consider “clean enough” looks like, they can end up in a state of endless conflict, even if it’s minor or suppressed on most days.

I think we also improve our empathy and understanding of each other when we view more things as orientations rather than preferences. In the below articles, I intend to describe how these preferences better fit the “orientation” model, and what sorts of problems can arise from mismatches in relationships without a natural alignment for them.

Relationship Orientation

Extended Family Orientation

Cleanliness Orientation

Edit: Jacob Falkovich has written a good post on Entertaining vs Building orientations.

Pokemon: The Origin of Species

Chapter 90: Coalition


The keening of the surviving cubone has changed in pitch, grief joined by confusion and pain. After confirming that the battle is over, the Rangers tend to their wounded and begin working to clear the stairway. Storing all the bodies presents a simple, if grim, challenge, but it’s complicated by a debate over whether they could relocate the surviving cubone without capturing them; they’re mostly young and weak, and returning them to the wild would largely be a death sentence, while removing them from the local ecology would further erode whatever balance it had.

It’s just the kind of conundrum Leaf would love to try to solve, if all of her attention wasn’t already focused on one thing.

“Red, wake up… please, come on. Red? Red!”

He’s slumped on the floor, breaths shallow and eyes closed tight, where he’s been ever since the cubone (and, they learned a minute later, the ghosts) stopped attacking. Leaf was too lost in the feelings she was helping Red project to realize her plan had worked until Jean called out a warning, and she opened her eyes just in time to see Red collapse to his knees, curling in on himself.

“What’s wrong with him?” Sergeant Iko asks, and Leaf jumps. She didn’t hear him approach, and her pulse is still racing as the stress of the battle transitioned straight to anxiety over Red’s condition without any chance to relax.

“I don’t know,” Leaf says, trying to control her panic. Don’t be hurt, Red, I didn’t mean for this to happen… It’s a useless thought, of course she didn’t mean for it to happen, but she knew it might and was okay with it anyway… and even in her panic, some detached part of her is noting that it worked, the cubone aren’t attacking and dying anymore, isn’t that worth it? “Jean, are you sensing anything?”

“His mood is erratic, and I can’t get a better sense of what’s going on without feeling some of it leak over,” the psychic says, all without opening her eyes. She’s been sitting next to him and massaging her temples. “It’s like he’s experiencing memories that aren’t his… and he doesn’t know how to process them.”

Leaf stares at her, bewildered. “Memories from…? People around him? Should we get him somewhere remote?”

“No, it seems related to what he did. I don’t know why projecting to the ghost above us would cause this—I don’t even know how he even managed to project and copy your mental state at the same time—but some of it may be from the ghost’s ‘scream’ going through my shield. I recognize that part in myself, at least, but the rest…” She shakes her head, frowning as her brow creases, then relaxes again.

Leaf takes a few deep breaths. She needs to focus on what her options are, but it’s hard to concentrate with the cubone’s pain filling the air…

“Come on, kid, up you get,” Iko says, and Leaf opens her eyes to see him gently lift Red like a child before she can object, arms cradling his back and knees. “Let’s get you some space to yourself…”

It’s a good thought, even if it doesn’t help it’s at least trying something, and Leaf follows the sergeant as he carries Red past the dividing segment between two hallways and sets him down. Red doesn’t move or otherwise react like he noticed any difference, and as Charmeleon walks over to crouch protectively beside his trainer, Leaf suddenly has to fight back tears.

“I need to check on the situation upstairs,” Iko says, and something in his voice makes Leaf look up to see the tension on his face. “The stairs are clearing up now, I’ll tell my people to carry him down and to the hospital once we’re sure it’s safe.”

She almost asks if something happened upstairs, but just nods. “Thank you,” she whispers, then clears her throat and switches on her earpiece as he leaves. “Blue? Everyone up there okay?”

“Leaf, hey, uh, it’s complicated. Jason and I are fine, but some rangers are… missing. What about you guys?”

Missing? She doesn’t have the concern or curiosity to spare, and instead looks at Red, worrying her lower lip. “Alive, but also… complicated. Take your time dealing with that.” There’s nothing he can do for Red… but maybe Jason… “Though can you ask—”

“Excuse me,” the voice of an old woman says from behind her. “I believe I can be of some assistance, if you’ll step aside?”

Leaf turns, blinks, then says, “Nevermind, Blue,” and steps aside.

Once they confirmed that the others were safe, the rangers on the top floor began searching it again, this time for the bodies of the rangers and their pokemon. No one has said the word “dead” yet, but the mood is distinctly non-celebratory.

Blue gets it. Everyone’s still wound tight from the battle, and there’s no time to grieve while there’s still some chance, however minor, that they can find them, save them. He would be helping, but there are enough people looking now that they’ll have the floor thoroughly covered soon, and he’s as sure as he can be that it’s hopeless given the brief experiment he ran a minute ago.

Plus, there’s someone else who might need his help more. Once Leaf abruptly ends her call, he goes to sit beside Jason, who’s resting cross legged on the floor by the stairway, face in his hands.

Eevee curls up against his side, and Blue rubs her fur, drawing comfort from the warm aliveness of her as she eats the berries he scatters on the ground. Jason’s lampent is still out of its ball too, bobbing beside him, and Blue wonders if the medium draws comfort from it in his own way. To Blue, with his goggles off, it’s just creepy.

“Hey,” Blue eventually says, and tilts his foot to nudge Jason’s shoe. “You okay? Got a headache from all the psychic stuff?”

The medium opens his eyes and blinks at Blue, not really seeming to see him for a moment. “I’m fine.” His voice isn’t flat, just calm in a way that makes Blue more worried rather than less.

“Uh huh. You know none of this was your fault, right?”

Jason continues staring at him a moment, then dips his face back into his hands. “I was the one that asked to try communing with it.”

Shit. He hates being right all the time. “Come on, we don’t know for sure that’s what set it off. It was a totally new situation, no one could have guessed what would happen.”

“All the more reason to have waited, left it for those with more experience…”

“What kind of attitude is that? You came here to investigate a mystery. Sure you can look back on it now and second-guess, but that takes guts, and we need more people willing to do the same.”

Jason raises his face again to look at Blue, maybe trying to judge how sincere he’s being. It’s probably hard for him, not being able to use his powers to check… though maybe Blue shouldn’t make assumptions like that. “You really believe that amateurs should be the first to explore new phenomena?”

“First off, knowing Red, he wouldn’t listen to you so seriously if he thought you were an amateur. Second, if everyone just waited on people like Gramps to investigate something they don’t understand, they’d never get any rest, and no one would learn how to deal with stuff themselves.” It’s something he remembers his grandpa saying was a problem, back when he started out. “Hell, the whole point of the pokedex is that people can and should go out and try to learn stuff for themselves, even if it’s dangerous.”

Jason doesn’t respond for a minute, and when he does his gaze is distant again, voice barely a whisper. “It was more than that. I thought I could… be in charge. To lead. It’s not something I’ve ever done before, but… I wanted to try. And people died.”

Blue almost points out that they don’t know they’re dead, but it would be a stupid thing to say when even he doesn’t believe it. So he stops trying to take away the responsibility for a moment, and focuses on how he feels.

He thinks of Gale, as he first saw her outside the tower, curious and alarmed about why they were running through the graveyard, surprised when she recognized him, and then excited and a bit awed by the goggles. His memory replays that moment when she dropped to the floor again and again, like a stinging needle in his thoughts, the sight of her blood sending a roil of shock and horror through him… and yes, some sliver of guilt. Could he have done more? Saved her and the other three rangers?

He doesn’t know. They weren’t under his “command,” so he doesn’t feel nearly as guilty about their deaths as he would if he was more than just along for the ride. But Jason does think of himself as having been in charge, in addition to holding himself responsible for the ghost turning hostile. Some part of him will always feel that responsibility… which means he needs to have it acknowledged.

“There’s a ritual I do,” he finally says. “Taught to me by a friend of mine, who I lost in the stormbringer attack on Vermilion.”

Jason’s head turns, and there’s something that’s not quite skepticism in his eyes. “A ritual?”

“Not a spiritual one,” Blue quickly adds. “We take turns, after incidents like this or training, talking about what we did wrong. Owning it, letting each other own it, and verbally, publicly committing to improving. I want to make sure you know, so you understand when I say… yes, you screwed up. I did too. I started constantly moving so it couldn’t surprise me any more, but I should have done that as soon as I saw it could teleport, should have called it out right away, I just didn’t think fast enough, didn’t anticipate that it would just keep doing it…” He remembers the surge of terror as it appeared next to him, even through the detached calm that usually keeps him focused during battles. “I’ll do better next time, and maybe others like Gale will survive.” He takes a breath, lets it out. The guilt isn’t gone. The words are just words. But he knows they’re important anyway. “That’s the last part, saying that. Do you want to try?”

Jason is quiet for a long time, gaze on the floor. “I should have practiced leadership in a situation with smaller stakes, first,” he finally says. “I should have paid attention to the Sergeant’s report, realized I was dealing with something new…” He shakes his head, closing his eyes. “I knew it was something unusual, even thought about waiting… I’m sorry Blue. I appreciate what you’re trying to do. But I don’t think there will be a next time, for me. I’m better off sticking to what I know.”

Blue stares at him, trying to think of what to say… he can’t just let Jason give up like that, can he? The ritual is supposed to be about owning your mistakes and moving on from the mistakes you make…

But maybe it’s not up to him to decide what “moving on” looks like for Jason.

His thoughts are interrupted by the sound of tapping. He looks around, then realizes it’s coming from the stairwell just in time to see Agatha of the Elite Four walk out of it.

She came dressed for battle, which means she’s wearing a long sleeved shirt, cargo vest, and form-fitting slacks, but to combat the weather she’s also got on a heavy coat made of ninetales fur, the absurdly rare kind that’s so deep a silver it almost looks blue. It matches her hair, and gives her an elegant air as she plants her cane between her feet and lifts her head, eyes closed, as if sniffing the air or letting some intangible breeze wash over her.

Blue thought he heard her voice when he was talking to Leaf, and feels relieved by the lucky timing. Beside her walks a second shadow, much too wide to be hers and only vaguely humanoid. With his goggles off, her gengar’s only features are two red eyes and a white slash below them, shaped like a malevolent grin. He quickly looks away from it as hair stands on end all over his body, and waits for Agatha to open her eyes before he waves to catch her attention.

The Elite turns to him, raises her brow, and walks over, cane tapping on the tiles like a metronome as she strides swiftly and energetically forward. Her shadow follows, bobbing from side to side to always stay furthest from the lights she passes by. It doesn’t really fool Blue, now that he knows it’s there, but it does make him feel unsettled, like he can’t quite be certain of it.

Jason has shifted to a kneeling position, bowing his head to his clasped hands. “Elite,” he murmurs once she stops in front of them. “My deepest apologies, for failing the charge you imparted on me through your tutelage.”

“Hey, Aunty,” Blue adds.

Jason turns his head to give Blue an incredulous look, while the Elite just snorts. “Hello, Blue. Care to explain why my old student sounds ready to fall on his sword?”

“He thinks reaching out to the ghost is what caused all this.”

“Hmph. Sit up, Jason. That’s it.” Agatha is short enough that she doesn’t have to reach to put her hand on the medium’s head once he finishes slowly rising up to rest on his heels. She closes her eyes, and he does the same. “Ah,” she says after a moment, and then her shoulders tighten, and she says it again, this time in a sigh. “Spirits, boy, how did you pull yourself out of that?”

“I didn’t,” Jason admits, voice thick, and wipes a sudden tear from his cheek. “My friend Red helped me.”

“Lucky,” she grunts, then takes a deep breath. When she blows it out, Jason breathes out with her, and some tension eases from his shoulders and neck. “There, there.” She pats his hair, and he wipes his face again as more tears flow. “You did what you could.”

“But if we’d waited for you… you could have—”

“Maybe.” She shrugs. “Would have liked to take a crack at it, that’s for sure. But that’s my ego and curiosity talking, the same things that drove you, and so only afford yourself a sliver of the responsibility. From what the Sergeant says he would have sent his people up here before I arrived anyway; at most you are only responsible for the pokemon that were killed downstairs.”

Jason’s shoulders hunch, but he nods. “I will guide their spirits myself.”

“Yes, you will. But only if you promise to eat and sleep when you need to; they’re in no rush, and you can’t let guilt taint their passing. Understood?”

Jason lets out a watery breath, but nods, and Agatha pats his hair once more. Then she turns to Blue, who feels like he maybe should have given them some privacy, but it’s too late now. “You’re unhurt?”

“Yeah.” She narrows her eyes, and he adds, “Just a bruise, nothing a potion won’t heal.” He hasn’t gotten around to it yet; something about letting the pain persist feels justified, for now, given the rangers who lost their lives.

Her eyes are still narrowed, and he sighs and unclips a bottle. She nods and looks around as he tugs his collar down and sprays the potion over his arm, shoulder, and back. “Did I beat Sam here?”

“Haven’t seen him, so I guess so.”

“Heh. That’ll irritate him.”

Her smug smile makes Blue snort. “Bet he says he was in the shower or something.”

“Oh no, far too pedestrian. In the middle of ‘a delicate scientific procedure,’ I’d guess.”

Blue grins, but only for a moment. He can tell she’s trying to cheer him up, maybe Jason too, and that thought brings him back to reality. “How bad is it downstairs?”

“Like a cubone slaughterhouse.” Her tone is dry, but he can hear the disgust in it, and winces. Leaf is probably taking it pretty hard… “It’s a damn shame, but at least they did it without losing anyone. Though your friend, Red, took a minute to put right. What have you been teaching him, Jason? He scrambled his brain something fierce trying to project to whatever was up here.”

Blue blinks, and turns to Jason, who looks just as surprised. They both scramble to their feet together, words overlapping.

“Red’s hurt—?”

“What happened—”

“Calm down, both of you. Said I put him right, didn’t I?” Agatha waits for them to still, then huffs as they continue to wait anxiously for answers. “He was projecting something the Juniper girl was feeling. Seemed to think it would help…”

She trails off as Jason whispers, “Ooooh…” He seems lost in thought a moment, then notices them both watching him. “I think it might have, actually, yeah. I wondered why… at the end, it felt like the scream ended.”

“Scream? Ah, the projection the ranger mentioned that called everything here?”

“Yes, that’s what Red called it. It was… pretty apt, actually. A constant ongoing projection, indiscriminate, full of pain…” He trails off, gaze distant. After a moment he blinks and looks at Agatha, then bows his head. “Apologies, Sensei. Thank you again.”

“It ended, during the battle?” Blue prompts. It’s always a bit annoying being around two people who can communicate, and more, in a way totally invisible to him. “The scream?”

“Oh, yes. Just before we attacked it the final time, when it held still. That’s why I called out… it seemed disoriented, for a moment.’

“So we killed it, then? It didn’t just run away?”

Jason opens his mouth, then closes it, frowning. “I wasn’t merged with it… normally I would say it was destroyed, but with the powers it showed… I can’t be sure. But it seems the most likely answer.”

Blue turns back to Agatha only to see her turn, and he realizes he hears more steps coming up the stairs. A moment later Leaf, Red, and the rest of the group arrive… along, finally, with Gramps.

“You’re sure you’re okay?” Leaf asks Red as they climb the stairs.

He’s touched by her continued concern, even after Elite Agatha’s brusque reassurance that he’d be fine, and so does his best to make his smile convincing. “Yeah. Sorry for scaring you like that.”

She smiles back and returns her attention to following Professor Oak up the stairs, but from the corner of his eye he sees Jean’s skeptical, assessing stare. He knows she got a sense for how bad off he is, but she doesn’t say anything, for which he’s grateful. It’s hard enough to keep putting one step in front of the other with his partitions all in shambles.

The last thing he clearly remembers before everything got… jumbled… is one part of him doing his best to receive and mirror Leaf’s pure, fervent goodwill, while the other part did its best to project it up at the ghost on the top floor, all while its scream overlaid his emotions through the shield Jean struggled to keep up. It’s not easy shielding someone else, and he’s surprised he lasted as long as he did…

But neither of them stood a chance once he merged with the ghost. He has no way of knowing how long he kept the projection going once he started it; everything after the initial moments of intention and concentration is lost in a haze of grief so deep and stark that it felt like he wasn’t even in

twisting

his body any more, or like the ghost was just the narrow entrance to a funnel

infinite

whose open mouth scattered his awareness into

chaos

shards.

Red frowns and shakes his head. The flashbacks aren’t as strong as when his spinarak attacked him in Vermilion, probably because it wasn’t an actual attack, but he can’t amnesia it away, either. Psychically he feels utterly and completely drained, and just trying to send out a psydar pulse made his consciousness blur and his feet stumble.

If Elite Agatha hadn’t shown up to do her own, more thorough version of whatever Jason does, he’s not sure if he would ever have come back.

So that’s kind of terrifying.

But only in an abstract way; he doesn’t really have much room for terror, with all the grief.

The only thing keeping him from finding a corner to curl up in right now is not wanting Leaf to worry about him, and the question of what happened on the top floor. He’s not sure when he’ll get to see the Professor tackle such a novel mystery again.

Still, the corners look very attractive.

Professor Oak arrived up the stairs at a winded jog, and barely spent a minute examining all the dead cubone and marowak, making sure he and Leaf were unhurt, and shaking hands with a starstruck Artem, before rushing up to the top floor. A few others from the lab came with him, and one stayed behind to examine the bodies, but it’s clear what the rest of them are here for. Now, as the researchers all eagerly crest the top of the stairs, they pause as they find a reception waiting for them.

“Late again, old man. Those youngsters slow you down?”

Elite Agatha’s voice is cheerful, and the Professor smiles as he strides over to his childhood rival, still breathing hard. “Some of us age far less gracefully than others, I’m afraid.” He takes her hand in his and raises it to his lips.

She scoffs and pulls her hand back, but she’s smiling. “You look limber enough to me.”

Red’s gaze hurriedly skips over the gengar at her side as he and the others step around them to reunite with Blue and Jason.

“Are you well?” Jason asks. “The Elite said…” He trails off, and Red knows he doesn’t need to ask, really; he can sense something of what Red is feeling, and the look of dismay on his face makes Red re-evaluate how he’s doing.

Maybe he’s just gotten used to it. Maybe that’s a bad thing.

“Fine,” he says, mostly for the others’ benefit, but also because he’s not sure what good talking about it would do. “You guys?”

“We’re good, thanks to you and Leaf, apparently.” Blue doesn’t seem particularly cheerful about it, and Red vaguely wonders why through the haze of numbing grief.

It’s Maria that asks. “How bad was it, Blue?”

“Bad. The rangers lost four people… including Gale.”

The words barely touch him, though there’s a moment of dull pain at the mention of Gale. What draws his attention more is what Agatha says next.

“He does mean ‘lost,’ Sam. Apparently the bodies are missing.”

“The pokemon too?” Leaf asks.

“Yes, everything that it hit.”

“No, I meant… the pokemon on their belts. Did everything they were wearing disappear with them?”

“Yeah,” Blue says. “Everything they were wearing.”

A drop of confusion colors the grey around him, but not much. When people are teleported everything connected to them disappears, so it’s not too strange that whatever did that here followed similar rules… though it is strange that so many people were teleported at once, not to mention that they’re inside…

And they were dark. That’s why they were sent up here to begin with.

But they were dead…

How long after they died did they disappear?

The color spreads, little by little, until his confusion turns to curiosity.

The Professor is frowning, and after a moment turns to the researchers with him. “Do a full EM scan, Tori. Carl, look for bio samples anywhere it was sighted, and where the bodies were last seen.” He turns to Blue, voice low. “I’m guessing you don’t think the rangers are going to turn up somewhere?”

“No,” Blue admits. “Only dead pokemon disappeared, so… Haku said he sprayed Gale’s wound with potion, but was too distracted to check the healing rate. And, well, there’s evidence all around us that seems pretty convincing too.”

Everyone begins looking around, and it’s Artem who walks over to the nearest crypt with a plaque and carefully opens it, then frowns. He closes it, then goes to another, frowning harder after he opens that one.

“Empty?” Red asks, feeling slow. He should have thought of that… but no, there’s some confusion buried under the thought.

“All the ones I checked,” Blue confirms. “Including one I saw before.”

Leaf rubs her eyes, voice dull. “Why take the urns or caskets, but not the whole drawer?”

That’s not it. There’s something deeper… if only he could think…

“That’s for you eggheads to figure out.” Blue says. “Assuming Gramps hasn’t already?”

“I’m afraid not,” Professor Oak says, and turns to Agatha. “Have you ever heard of anything remotely like this?”

“None of the stories of corpse stealers had any of the other features of this tragic mess,” she says. “Whatever spirit caused it was more burdened than any I’ve heard of.”

“It was more than burdened, Sensei,” Jason murmurs, gaze down. “It was… twisted.”

She frowns at him. “Speak your doubt, Jason. You have nothing to fear.”

The medium bows his head in thanks, then seems to gather his words. “It felt… unnatural. I won’t go so far as to say ‘evil,’ even as a hypothesis… but there was something in it that felt fundamentally different from anything I’ve merged with before. Like it was only partially of this world, and partially…”

“Outside,” Red says, and now everyone’s looking at him, but

infinite

he’s struggling against

distorted

the memories he can’t amnesia away.

“Verres,” Agatha says, voice stern. “You’ll need rest, and soon. We can talk more about this later… perhaps you should go down, find lodging—”

“No, I’m okay,” Red says. “Really, I want to be here.” I don’t want to be alone with my thoughts, with nothing else to think about…

She frowns at him, but nods.

“Red’s right,” Jason says. “That word fits, outside.”

There’s a beat of silence at that, and Red hears the quick, heavy steps of some rangers walking past. Their faces look tense, their eyes moving restlessly over everything around them. He wonders if they were close to the missing (dead) ones, and feels a tremor of pain work through him.

“It was a spirit, though?” Agatha clarifies after a moment.

“Yes. I called it a new pokemon, when I first merged with it, and it’s not… unlike others… it still felt like one.”

“Actually,” Blue says. “There’s one thing that makes me wonder if it was a pokemon at all.” Everyone looks at him, and he holds up an ultraball. “This got a lock, I’m sure of it. But when I threw… it went through whatever it was we were fighting.”

Professor Oak holds a hand out for the ball, opens it, and starts examining the inside, while Red tries to think. “How… substantial, did it seem? Could you see through it at all? Did it seem to move with mass?”

Blue exchanges an uncertain look with Jason. “It all happened fast… but it did seem really agile. I don’t think I could see through it, but with the goggles on it was hard to tell…”

“From my lampent’s sight, it seemed as real as any of the other spirits in the room,” Jason says. “And it’s hard to imagine something less dense than a gastly core could hold that club…”

“Yeah, that part we know was solid.” Blue’s voice is bitter.

“Club?” Red asks.

“Oh, right… it looked like a marowak. A really scary, stretched out marowak, but there was no mistaking the skull helmet and bone club.”

“But not like the Alolan Marowak,” Jason clarifies. “They are still living creatures touched by the spirit world, like sensu oricorio, or decidueye. This pokemon was a spirit, through and through.”

Artem clears his throat, then speaks for the first time since coming upstairs. “If it was the first of its kind… if we assume spontaneous abiogenesis… I’m going to check and see if there were marowak remains somewhere on this floor. But either way, it may not be accurate to think of it as a variant of the marowak species. It might mimic their appearance, but be no more related than luvdisc and alomomola.”

“With the descriptions of the surreality it projected onto the whole floor, it’s hard to know how much even visual testimony can be trusted,” Jean notes. “Can you be sure your ball passed through it?”

Red watches Blue bristle for a moment, then sigh, tension running out of him. “No. Our vision was being messed with, and there were times its body seemed to move in ways unconnected to how it appeared to move… Maybe where I was seeing it, and where it was, were two different things.” He turns to Jason. “Did you happen to see…?”

The medium is already shaking his head, looking contrite. “From lampent’s perspective, the ball and the spirit touched. But it was in the path of the ball; it could have passed on the far side of it, from its angle, and only appeared to pass through.”

“Seems unlikely, but we’ll take it as at least partial evidence that the throw was solid,” Professor Oak says, still examining the inside of the ball. “Assuming we can trust the lampent’s vision to not be affected too, of course, which is difficult to know since Jason didn’t try the goggles on to see what it was like as a comparison, I’m assuming?”

“Ah, no,” Jason says, seeming even more apologetic.

Blue puts a hand on the medium’s shoulder. “There wasn’t really time to experiment.”

“Yes, of course,” the Professor says. “No blame was meant.” He turns to the third researcher beside him. “Collect every ball on this floor that might have gotten a lock, or even attempted a scan, on the pokemon.” The woman nods and hurries away, and Professor Oak minimizes the ball Blue handed him and pockets it. “As long as they didn’t attempt to scan anything else, the last thing they were focused on should be in their memory. Hopefully we can use the data in them to better understand what we’re dealing with.”

“As for the rest of you,” Agatha says, voice firm. “Down the tower, off to get your pokemon healed and get some rest, unless you can make a convincing argument that you can provide direct value staying here now and not later.”

Red almost says something, but then she gives him a hard look that he understands to mean she won’t accept basically any argument he makes, and he doesn’t have the energy to come up with something clever anyway. The elusive confusion doesn’t return or clarify, and ultimately he feels like his presence here was useless, so he just listens to Artem and Jason try to make their case for staying, and once they’re shot down, heads for the stairway with them.

It’s hard to pay attention to the conversations others are having as they make their way down, but everyone goes quiet anyway once they reach the corpses on the floor below. The rangers have cleared a path, but not done much more in the way of cleaning up.

“Goddamn,” Blue mutters as they finally pass through the worst of it and reach the last few bodies that came to rest at the foot of the stairs below the battle. “Knew we should have just let it die.”

Red expects Leaf to say something, but when he glances over he sees the conflict in her face. He wonders if she’s torn between agreeing with him and not, or torn between being tactful and speaking her mind; Blue’s almost certainly thinking more about the rangers than the cubone and marowak that were killed.

Red musters his energy and focus. “If we let it die we’d never have learned anything about it. The whole point of coming here was to see if there was some new threat.”

“I know.” Blue sighs and rubs his face. “Just doesn’t feel like a win.”

“If it makes you feel better,” Jean says from behind them, “I kind of doubt it was actually suicidal.” They all turn to her, and she shrugs. “I know it felt like it was grieving and in pain, but would it have fought so hard if it really wanted to die? Think of victreebel, emitting a sweet scent to trap and eat any pokemon that comes to investigate.”

Red should have thought of that too. He grabs hold of this new aspect of the mystery, trying to focus, and he suddenly remembers what Maria said on their way to the tower. “You said it might not have scared off the ghosts, but consumed them.”

The quiet girl shrugs. “It was just a thought. But it seems as good an explanation as any…”

“Though it doesn’t explain the people who were lurking around the tower,” Blue adds. “Assuming they were related at all.”

“Would the ghost have tried to eat cubone and marowak too?” Leaf asks. “Or was attracting them just a side effect?”

Red’s thoughts drift as the conversation continues, and by the time they’re on the bottom floor all he can think about is how nice it would be to get back to the Trainer House and drop into bed. The snow is still falling outside, and they pause to put their warmer clothing back on before stepping out into the cold whiteness around the tower.

People are still talking, and it all sounds like a buzz in his ears. The crunch of steps on the snow is louder, as is his breathing. It seems to fill the world, the stark, empty, monochrome world

outside

and then the buzz is much louder, with people shouting and no crunching footsteps and his heartbeat in his ears, and everything goes

inside out

black instead of white.

Red wakes in stages, each sense registering one at a time. First comes touch, the feeling of being wrapped in a warm cocoon, except for his face, which is slightly cool. Next is smell: clean linen, first and foremost, with something savory wafting in the background. After that comes hunger and thirst pangs from his stomach and throat, along with the bitter-mouth taste of having fallen asleep without brushing his teeth.

As he continues to swim toward consciousness he registers voices, murmuring through a wall or two, and that’s when the memories come. The tower, the marowak and cubone, the ghost… he instinctively flinches, but no painful memories surface, and a moment later—

Oh good, we’re awake.

A moment of disorientation as he wonders who he is, “which Red” he is, but the answer is obvious; what he heard was his unpartitioned self, meaning he’s the partitioned one, and that means his psychic abilities are working again.

A quick pulse of psydar confirms that, and that there’s a small group of people clustered nearby, and finally he opens gummy eyes and peers around him.

Where the hell are we?

Red has no idea (of course, otherwise his unpartitioned self would know too). It looks like a generic guestroom, so he’s not in the trainer house, or a hospital. He quickly pulses his psydar again, then focuses on the nearby minds, recognizing Leaf first, and—

He relaxes, letting a long breath out. Mom. He’s at his mother’s apartment, the one she’s been staying in for weeks now as she follows whatever lead she has in Lavender Town.

He can sense that she’s worried about him, but not actually concerned, so he guesses he wasn’t in any danger. Which makes sense, since he’s here instead of a hospital… he wonders how he got here…

Oh. She’s noticing the merger. Has she been practicing with a psychic?

He quickly withdraws from her mind, but a moment later he hears footsteps, and the door opens.

“Red!” Two steps and she’s there, sitting beside him and running her hand through his hair as she looks down at him with a worried smile. “How do you feel? Do you need anything?”

Her hand feels nice, and for a moment he just wants to curl up against her like he was a kid again. Then he hears other footsteps and sees Blue and Leaf hovering at the doorway, and clears his throat, embarrassed. “Water?”

“I’ll get it,” Leaf says, and hurries away while Blue leans against the doorway, looking relieved.

“I’m fine,” Red tells his mom, and shifts to sit up. “How long…?”

“About five hours,” Blue says. “You gave us a good scare, buddy. Aunty Ag said you’d be okay, but even she was concerned that you fainted again. She’s got some questions when you’re feeling better.”

“I’ll do my best,” Red says, which seems a tactful way to say that he has no idea what even happened because the partitions are keeping him safe from it.

“When you’re feeling better,” his mother repeats, frowning at him. “Not as soon as you wake up.”

“It might be important, if whatever it is is still going on,” Blue says, a little apologetically.

Mom’s brow furrows, but then she sighs and nods. “Go ahead and let them know, then.”

Blue nods and takes his phone out as he walks away, just as Leaf returns with a glass of water and a bowl of the savory stew he smelled. “In case you’re hungry?”

“I am, yeah. Thanks.” He takes the glass first and drinks—gods that’s nice—then sets it down on the nightstand and carefully takes the soup bowl. It’s warm without being hot, and absolutely delicious.

“Easy, Red,” his mom says. “It’s not going anywhere.”

Red slows down, cheeks hot. “How did I get here?” he asks after swallowing another spoonful.

“What do you remember?” Leaf asks.

“Um. Snow. We’d just left the tower…?”

“Yeah. When you fell, we put you on a stretcher and took you back inside, calling for help. The ranger medic said you were physically okay, and Agatha did something psychic and said you just needed rest… We weren’t sure whether we should take you to the hospital or the trainer house, and then I thought to call Laura.”

“I figured you’d be able to rest better here,” Laura explains, and Red knows she probably hadn’t left it up to debate. “One of the local doctors made a house call just to be sure, and agreed you were physically fine, so… we’ve just been waiting.”

Red has finished his soup as they talk, and his stomach rumbles. His mom takes the bowl with a smile. “I’ll get you more. Do you think you can handle some crackers too?”

“Uh, yeah, thanks,” he mumbles, cheeks hot. Rather than lingering on the thought of Leaf seeing his mom dote on him, he quickly tries to shift the focus back to other things. “What about the others? Did the Professor’s team learn anything yet?”

Leaf smiles. “Maybe, but if so they haven’t been broadcasting it or anything.”

“Right.” He chides himself for his impatience and shifts to sit a bit more comfortably against his pillow, trying to focus on something else. It’s a huge relief that his abilities seem to be back and working properly, and he keeps instinctively sending his power out, skimming the minds of those around him as if to prove to himself that he’s okay.

His mom feels much more cheerful than she did when he first merged with her upon waking. Leaf, on the other hand..

“Holding up okay?” he murmurs. He was almost too wrapped up in himself to notice how miserable she must have been after the battle at the tower, but now it’s as if she’s giving herself space to grieve.

She meets his gaze, then drops hers, hands splaying on her knees, fingers gripping and releasing. “Yeah. No. I don’t know.”

Red nods, but doesn’t say anything, giving her time to elaborate if she wants to. He almost doesn’t realize that he’s doing what Dr. Seward does to him. Shit, we have to tell her about all this… that’s going to be a conversation…

“It was harder than I thought it would be,” Leaf says after another moment. “I mean, we faced something pretty extreme, so… it makes sense that it would bother me even if something like this happened while we were all still traveling together. But it was…” She trails off, and shakes her head, mouth pressed into a thin line.

“I’m glad you were there,” Red says once the silence has spun out for a while. “If you weren’t… we would have probably ended up having to kill all of them, assuming we weren’t overwhelmed.” He wonders if anyone’s checked how far the scream was traveling yet. How many more pokemon were on their way before it ended? “And more people upstairs might have been killed before they could stop it.”

Leaf hesitates, then nods, sighing. “I’m glad it worked. And I’m glad you were there, to make it work.” Her shoulders slump, and when she meets his gaze again Red is alarmed to see them shine with tears. “And I’m glad you’re okay.”

Red’s brain locks up, and he tries to think of something to say or do. Before he can there are footsteps in the hall, and his mom enters with a tray. “I brought some fruit and cheese too.”

Leaf wipes at her eyes, and Red feels the moment pass as he reflexively takes the tray from his mother. “Thanks.” Hungry as he was a moment ago he doesn’t start eating, and an awkward silence descends.

His mom finally seems to realize that she might have interrupted something, because she says, “Well, I’ve still got six hundred words to write today, and I’m a bit behind now. I’ll be in the other room if either of you need anything.”

“Thank you, Laura.”

“Thanks, Mom.” Once she leaves, the nature of the quiet changes from awkwardness to expectation, and it takes Red a moment to decide on something to say. “Leaf, I don’t want you to…”

He trails off as he hears more footsteps approaching, and then Blue walks into the small room and plops down on the bed beside him.

“Man, it’s cold outside,” Blue complains as he takes some of the cheese and crackers from Red’s tray, speaking with his mouth full. “Gramps and Ag said they’ll be back tomorrow anyway, so unless you have some amazing insight to share we might as well meet up in the morning instead.”

“Right,” Red mutters as he tries to think of some way to get Blue to leave. He wants to reassure Leaf, wants to make sure she doesn’t blame herself… but somehow it feels too personal to do while Blue is here, and the topic of risking-ourselves-to-help-others still feels like a slightly raw subject…

Hey genius, we’re psychic, remember?

Red slowly smiles, then starts eating his soup as he focuses on the feelings he wants Leaf to understand. He relies on his unpartitioned self to make sure they don’t repeat what happened on the cruise and overshare, but his cheeks still feel a bit warm as he projects the feelings of gladness and respect and appreciation for mutually making each other better people…

Leaf sucks in a breath, and when he looks up at her she’s smiling at him. He smiles back, cheeks feeling even warmer.

“What?” Blue asks, looking between them as he bites into one of the sliced pears. “I miss something?”

“No,” Leaf says, grinning even as she shakes her head. “If you’re hungry why don’t you get your own food?”

Blue blinks, then looks at his half eaten pear slice and swallows guiltily. “Ah, sorry, Red. I’ll go get you some more—”

“Nah, it’s fine.” He wonders, too late, if that was Leaf’s attempt to have Blue leave… maybe she wanted to say something herself. “I mean you can, if you want.”

Blue glances at Leaf apprehensively. “Uh…”

“Just ask next time. Like this. May I have a slice of pear, Red, or do you need every scrap of energy to recover from your harrowing ordeal?” The look she gives Red is still one of secret laughter, and he feels something like wings flapping in his chest.

“Yes you may, though if I should collapse again from exhaustion, I hope you feel very guilty.”

“That’s very kind of you, and of course I will be sure to—”

“Okay, I get it,” Blue says, and sighs as they start giggling while Leaf takes some pear for herself. “You guys finish getting all the giddy relief out? We’ve got business to discuss. Not that I’m not also really glad you’re awake, Red, particularly after… you know.”

Red nods, remembering how hard Blue took his friend Glen going into a coma. He suspects it was especially hard for Blue because it happened while he wasn’t with him, just like this would have been. “I know.” He starts sipping his soup. “What sort of business?”

“Weeeeell, Leaf and I were talking about it, and… what do you think about selling our story to a movie producer?”

Red blinks. “What story? You mean what happened at the tower?”

“More than that, our story! The Oaklings, or Pallet Three, or whatever. Volume One, for now, but the stuff at the Tower makes for a pretty good first climax, don’t you think?”

Red stares at Blue, unsure how serious to take him. Leaf starts giggling, and he chuckles, relieved that it’s a joke, until Blue frowns at her.

“Hey whose side are you on?”

“I know, Blue, I know,” she says, trying to control herself without much luck. “It’s just… his face…”

Red tries to shift his features into something less… whatever he looked like that set Leaf off. “I uh, don’t… think I get it. I mean this is a PR thing, right? I get that much, but are we really…”

“Heroes? Damn right we are! I mean stopping a few renegades here and there, lots of people do that around the world, but how many groups as young as us have, twice? Combined with the abra technique, me and Daisy and Gramps during the storm, the gym stuff I’ve been doing… okay, not really heroic but different and interesting… now this?” He shakes his head. “Don’t you see what we did? We took down a new legendary!”

Red stares. “That’s not… do you really think that?”

“I think people can’t prove otherwise,” Blue says. “Maybe it was just a baby, but we fought it within hours of it being born, or manifesting or whatever, and it was that dangerous? Can you imagine how powerful it might have become if we hadn’t stopped it?”

Red’s stomach drops at the idea of facing something even twice as strong. They still don’t know how large the range was, unless they figured it out while he was sleeping, and from what he heard, it was winning against around eight trainers at once up until Leaf’s projection hit it. “It still feels like a stretch to compare it to the Stormbringers. And arrogant.”

“That’s what I said,” Leaf adds. “But I think he’s onto something even if we don’t make that claim. We’ve got enough under our belts to do something more than just write posts about our experiences. A lot of it was terrifying and tragic…” She trails off, for a second, then sighs. “But I have to admit that, from an outside perspective, it would probably all seem pretty exciting.”

“And inspiring,” Blue adds.

“You think we can summarize over half a year into a single film?”

“Oh, we don’t have to cover all of it,” Blue assures him. “There’s a clear arc now! Leaf discovered her love shield thing with the abra, you had some trouble with your powers, but then learned to harness them, and now you both combined your efforts to beat the ghost!”

It’s bizarre having his life be described in a way that has “story arcs,” but he gets what Blue means; the movie would have a structure, related to historic events that would make it more than just a film about some semi-famous trainers on their journey. It would have justification, rather than just coming off as a PR thing.

But it would still be a PR thing.

Don’t forget money. Maybe even a lot of money.

“What about you?” Red asks, mostly just to fill the expectant silence.

“Eh, I caught the most abra even without tricks, and I was with the rangers who ended up fighting the thing. I think I’ll make out okay, and besides, my story’s the most exciting one between major events.”

Leaf snorts, but doesn’t argue the point, and Red finds himself smiling. “I still think it’s kind of a stretch, pitching ourselves as important enough for our own film.”

“But…?” Blue is grinning, and Red knows it’s obvious his resolve is crumbling.

Is he really considering this? He has been saying he would work on being more open to PR stuff, and when he examines what makes him uncomfortable about this, it’s all the same things he said before, which they had good arguments against.

Plus money.

He wonders if he should be worried that his unpartitioned self cares so much about money, suddenly, and then decides that the objections about making money feel even less convincing than the ones about not appearing arrogant or worrying about his image.

“Alright,” he sighs, and Blue clasps his fists together above his head in a victory pose while Leaf grins. “What do you need me to do?”

“Don’t worry about it right now, focus on resting.” Leaf says.

“I’m fine. I mean, I feel fine, much better than before.” Surprisingly better, really, but then that’s what amnesia is for. He remembers his first experiment, where the psychic in Pewter kept removing her memories of being hit by Night Shade over and over, and wonders how long it took her to let those partitions down and work through the feelings they caused.

“I’m glad to hear it, but either way right now there’s nothing you need to do. I’ll reach out to some people in the film industry—”

“Make sure you ask Gramps, he knows a few—”

“—and at some point you’ll probably sign some stuff and talk about things that happened, but we just wanted to make sure you’d be on board with it first.”

“Thanks,” he tells her, and turns to Blue. “Both of you. For looking out for my interests so much. This is… not something I ever really imagined, for myself.”

“Hey, what are friends for?” Blue leans forward to take another slice of pear. “Heard rumors that Brendan, May, and Wally are getting their own trilogy for everything that happened in Hoenn, so Kanto needs to step up.”

The original idea was to gather the next morning in one of the Ranger meeting rooms under Lavender Tower, but shortly after waking Leaf sees a message from Blue saying the new plan is to use a rented studio in the town’s sole office plaza. Apparently the list of attendees kept growing by the hour, and the tower doesn’t have anywhere big enough to squeeze in everyone that was there during the incident, plus the additional experts and researchers that showed up after Red fainted, the most prestigious of which are Leader Matsuba and Professor Elm from Johto.

Leaf rushes through the chores at the ranch so she can teleport back to Lavender on time. Sadly with snow on the ground there are fewer pokemon that can be let out, as many lack the instincts or terrain they would use in the wild to stay warm, but it does mean she finishes fairly quickly, and manages to arrive at the meeting early.

It’s set in a large conference room with glass walls, and the only people seated are some researchers she doesn’t recognize. Leaf nervously confirms she’s in the right place, then takes a seat and checks where Red and Blue are. Both say they’re on their way, so she reads over her messages and sees one from Natural asking her how the investigation is going, which reminds her that she hasn’t had the chance to tell him what happened.

She does so now, summarizing as best she can while still highlighting all the main points. His responses make her grin.

what

what?!

no seriously what are you joking what the hell

are you okay?!

She answers questions until more and more people start to trickle in, then promises him a call later and gets up to greet her friends as they arrive together. Blue and Maria take the seats to Leaf’s left while Red and Artem sit to her right, and it’s a relief to see how much better Red looks this morning, even compared to how much better he looked after waking at his mother’s. The emotions he shared with her still make her feel a warm buzz in her chest when she thinks of it, and help dispel any lingering self-blame she might have had over putting him at risk with her plan.

The room fills up quickly, and other than her group almost none of the faces are familiar from the tower, though she does recognize others from online. Elite Agatha shows up in the same coat as the day before, and once again Leaf is torn between noting that the coat looks amazing while wondering if it’s real, and if it is, how the ninetales died. Some pokemon are killed for their coats, but surely one as rare as that wouldn’t have been?

When Leader Sabrina arrives, Red goes to greet her with a respectful nod. Leaf sees the surprise on his face when she bows her head back, murmuring something to him, and after a brief back and forth the Leader reaches out to squeeze his shoulder, then goes to greet Elite Agatha.

“What’d she say?” Leaf whispers when Red returns.

“Just… that she’s really glad I’m okay, and proud of me.”

It seemed like it was more than that, but then again, Sabrina always struck her as distant, so the show of affection would probably be surprising.

More people continue to trickle in, rangers and psychics and researchers, as well as a couple more Kanto Leaders, including Misty, and…

Leaf’s pulse jumps as she sees Leader Giovanni in person again for the first time since Mount Moon. His gaze sweeps the room, pausing here and there, nodding to someone or the other, and her stomach flips as those dark eyes rest for a beat on her. She finds herself nodding back without any conscious decision, and as his gaze moves on and he eventually goes to find a seat, she feels anger at herself for returning the gesture. She knows she’s being ridiculous, it was just a neutral sign of acknowledgement he gave many others, it’s not like it was some token of mutual conspiracy… she would probably be mad at him if he just ignored her, or worse, didn’t even recognize her…

Professor Oak and his entourage are among the last to arrive, looking like they spent the whole night up doing research. Elite Agatha taps her wristwatch, which causes the Professor to grin as he takes a seat while his researchers open container boxes full of food and drinks. As they start handing out mugs of steaming coffee and tea, more boxes continue to be summoned, these containing beanbags for people to sit on.

“Sorry for the delay, everyone. We’re all here? Ready to record? Great.” Professor Oak clears his throat. “The purpose of this meeting is to share our preliminary findings on the various phenomena related to the incident at Lavender Tower yesterday, and collect further details from those present. To begin with, thanks to Dalia we’ve got a rough measure of how far the ‘psychic scream’ went, so let’s start there.”

He leans back in his seat and sips from his tea, and the woman in question steps forward from where she was leaning against the wall. “So, basically I just made a lot of cold calls and put up some posts on public forums,” she says, hand fidgeting with the string of the tea bag hanging out of her own mug. “We know from multiple reports that it at least covered all of Lavender, but no sensitives or psychics in Saffron or Cerulean City noticed anything strange. Between those two distances we got a single positive response from the nearby ranger outpost just west of town. We can speculate that it might have gone further than that, but at least we have a maximum range. As for the minimum… the outpost was nearly twenty-four kilometers from Lavender Tower.”

Blue gives a low whistle, then mutters, “That’s a lot of cubone that might have made their way to the tower.”

“Is there any psychic phenomenon that’s been recorded with an effect that large before?” one of the rangers asks.

“Not in reliable sources,” Professor Oak says, then smiles as Elite Agatha clucks her tongue. “But given the events in Hoenn, I think we’re all a little more open to taking a second look at… slightly less robust ones…?”

He turns to Agatha, who nods. “There are stories, just stories, I freely admit, of spirits capable of beguiling entire towns, of forests haunted by something powerful enough to keep anyone attempting to enter it away. In my youth I investigated a few of these, and found nothing to corroborate them that survived to the modern day. It’s possible that what was felt was not, in fact, the effects of a single spirit, but a confluence of them, limited in time such that they usually disperse before any proper investigation can be mounted. But there are some exceptions, and I’ll leave explaining one of them to Morty, who is more studied on such matters.”

Leader Matsuba bows his head. “You honor me, Elite.” The Johto Leader is dressed much more casually than most psychics she’s seen; black shirt, white pants, and a purple scarf that shifts to red at the ends, along with a purple headband. Despite his casual appearance and relatively young age, however, his gaze is nearly as intense as Elite Agatha’s, and Leaf wonders if Red’s eyes will ever look like that when he gets older or more psychically experienced. “It’s true that I’ve studied Ghost pokemon absorption, but I won’t claim to be an expert.”

“If you’re not an expert, then we have none,” Professor Oak cheerfully says. “Just tell us what you can.”

“There are only a few species that we’ve actually observed doing this, and spiritomb is the most well studied… but like my potential expertise, that’s not saying much, since only a handful have ever been captured. The oldest spiritomb we have records of is from Sinnoh, where carvings of spirits trapped in a keystone were found from over five hundred years ago. Leader Fantina has been hunting it, convinced that it was hidden away somewhere in the region. From what we’ve observed in captured spiritomb, they appear to get a larger power boost than any others when they consume other ghosts… but this is offset by how much time they spend afterward hibernating, only to re-emerge months, sometimes years, later, more erratic and harder to tame than before.” He fiddles with the edge of his scarf a moment. “It may be worth noting that each time a spiritomb is captured, it registers as a new pokemon.”

Professor Oak is nodding. “So your hypothesis is that this ghost was something like a spiritomb, which consumed all the ghosts in the area, accounting for its erratic behavior and extreme strength.”

“Yes. And like the spiritomb, what it appears to be is not what it really is.” Leader Matsuba turns to Blue. “The data from your ball confirms that you locked onto something, just like the ball found near where the first two rangers disappeared. But what you locked onto was not the distorted image of the marowak; that was a mere projection, much like a spiritomb’s swirling ‘face’ of green lights and purple gas.”

Blue does an admirable job of not looking too bitter, considering that the others who were fooled ended up dead. “The mask?”

Professor Oak shakes his head. “The club. We studied the data as best we could throughout the night, and it wasn’t just bone; there were semi-organic compounds in it, similar to those found in marowak bone. Assuming it was killed, whatever remains it left behind must have vanished, along with the rest of the corpses on the floor.”

The room is silent for a moment, and Leaf wonders if the rangers are regretting that it was killed, or bitterly glad that their lost friends were avenged. The researchers are obviously disappointed, Red included, but she suspects only Jason, Agatha, and Matsuba are mourning the spirit itself. And Blue must be beating himself up over how close he came to capturing a newly discovered pokemon (and a strong one, of course) only to miss by inches… maybe he’s worried people will blame him for messing up…

“So?” Blue abruptly asks. “What do we think? Did we stop a new legendary from being born?”

A chuckle works its way around the room, and Leaf sees Leader Misty smirk knowingly at Blue, who manages to look innocently curious.

“That would be a strong claim to make,” Professor Oak says, and though he’s also clearly amused his tone makes it clear how serious he is, probably for the sake of the recording. “And would require more evidence than we are likely to ever have, unless another one appears… which, given how powerful it was, would be a mixed blessing at best.”

Blue nods, and Leaf covers her smile with her hand. She hasn’t reached out to the Professor yet, and wonders if he already knows of their plans from Blue; either way he probably suspected why Blue was trying to get an answer to that in an official statement.

“That brings us to the next point,” Sergeant Iko says. “We’re presuming it was killed for a few decent reasons… the surreality field or whatever the hell that was ended, it hasn’t shown up anywhere else, and the remains of everything, including those interred in the top floor of the tower, all vanished, leaving us unable to verify its death the ordinary way. But we can’t take for granted that it’s gone, and everyone around Lavender will be on high alert for a while.”

One of the higher ranking rangers in the room nods. “We’re discussing a general alert for all graveyards around the islands, in case it’s drawn to such places, but unfortunately it would stretch us out pretty thin to maintain any real vigilance for more than a couple days. At the very least, a pair of rangers or gym members at each major cemetery will likely be announced by noon.”

“In any case,” Sergeant Iko says, “As of today we’ve given up the search for the missing rangers, and are presuming them dead as well. Their loss, and the loss of their pokemon, including all those on their belts, will be felt throughout the town, and beyond it.”

His voice is calm, but Leaf can see the heaviness in his eyes, and suspects he didn’t get much sleep last night either. He looks as though he’s going to add something else, until Professor Elm clears his throat, drawing everyone’s attention to him before he speaks for the first time.

“I’d like to raise a curiosity, though I know it may muddy the water a bit. Well, a curiosity, and a caution, against assuming we understand why the rangers disappeared. To be clear, I understand why we would assume that.” He turns to Sergeant Iko and dips his head. “You have my sympathy for their loss, Sergeant, and for having to make a call despite the uncertainty. I don’t mean to give false hope, or rub salt in the wound—”

“—I understand,” Sergeant Iko says, tone even. “And appreciate your concern. Get to your point, please.”

Professor Elm hesitates, then nods. “Right. Simply put, there’s no definition of ‘death’ that fits our observations.”

“Of course!”

Everyone turns to Red, who abruptly sinks into his seat, cheeks flushed. Professor Oak chuckles, Leader Sabrina covers something between a cough and a laugh behind her hand, and then a ripple of laughter moves through the room as her friend tugs his hat a bit lower.

“Sounds like Mr. Verres got there ahead of me?” Professor Elm asks with a smile.

“No, no, I… I was confused about it at the time but… I didn’t figure it out until you said that.”

The realization hit Leaf a little more subtly—what her thoughts leapt to from Elm’s words was a conversation she had with Blue and Red back in Viridian Forest, about how long Dark pokemon retain their psychic immunity after death—but she decides Red could use some rescuing. “Oooh, I get it! Their cells would still be alive!”

Professor Elm nods. “Exactly. There’s no firm definition for ‘medical death.’ It’s basically a function of our technology; at one point in history, not having a heartbeat anymore would mean death, but then we learned how to revive even from that, if we’re quick and lucky. Nowadays I would say someone could survive practically anything but a damaged heart or brain as long as they get the right treatment on time, but even that might change as our medicine gets better.”

The Johto Professor’s smile has faded by now, and the mood of the room returns to its earlier grimness. Worse than giving the rangers up as dead is the idea that they may have still been alive when they went wherever they did… assuming they went anywhere at all, of course.

“There are many different answers as to when the spirit leaves the body,” Elite Agatha says into the silence. “I had a similar thought, but nothing to suggest in its place as a rule for why those rangers disappeared. Do you?”

“No, and I don’t mean to get metaphysical, so I’ll just conclude by saying that, if we assume dead organic matter was the criterion, without circulation it would take minutes for all the cells in the body to die at room temperature. At best we can probably say that being unconscious divided those that disappeared from those that didn’t, but even that might be wrong. Maybe it was only those who were touched by the club, as we have no living counter-examples to compare to.” Professor Elm shrugs. “Like I said, just another confusion to add to the list.”

The room is silent again. No one offers any ideas, and after a moment Sergeant Iko stirs. “Thank you for raising those questions. I look forward to seeing what answers might be found on them, but right now there’s something else that seems more important.” He surprises Leaf by turning to her. “We have three people in particular to thank for there not being more casualties. While the other effects of the ghost may prove a perpetual mystery, I would like to know more about what Leaf, Red, and Jean did that paralyzed it, in case it can be repeated in other situations.”

“Paralyzed?” Leader Matsuba asks.

“Not in the traditional sense,” Jason says. “But from my observation, it did appear to go still, its scream interrupted, at around the time that they report trying to project feelings to it. That’s when we struck, all together, and, presumably, destroyed it.”

“I’ll take my share of credit, but it’s not much,” Jean says frankly. “I only provided a shield to Red as best I could, and have only a vague idea of what he did and how.”

The room’s attention shifts to Red. “I was projecting what Leaf was focusing on.” Red shrugs, adjusting his hat a little to reveal more of his face, though his cheeks are still pink. “As for what that was, and why it might have worked, she’d be the best person to ask.”

Now everyone is staring at her. She mentally rehearsed what she might say on the way here, expecting something like this—she even wrote some notes last night for an article she plans to write on it—but giving the report, on an official recording of the incident, still makes her nervous. “It was, ah, basically just a strong feeling of… love, and reassurance, and a desire that it should live.”

The room is quiet, and she wipes a sweaty palm on her pantleg. No one laughs, at least, and the researchers all look fascinated.

“I read your article on how you caught abra, and the follow-up experiments,” one of Professor Elm’s group says. “Were there others that you haven’t recorded, or was this the first attempt with a Ghost type?”

“The latter, but I don’t think this was the same thing. From what I understand of projection, it forces the emotions on the receiver?” She glances at Red, Jean, Jason, and Agatha, but no one contradicts her. “So the ghost was feeling what it was projecting to others. I think this was particularly effective because it was specifically countering what the ghost was focusing on.”

“It goes beyond even that,” Agatha says. “Spirits do not simply feel emotions. In a very meaningful sense, they are their emotions, given tangible form. They still have minds of their own, and so while they can be conditioned, they are not beholden to any psychic that decides to project onto them… but this is why spiritual attacks are so effective against them, as with psychic.”

No one quite seems to know how to respond to that, and after a moment Sergeant Iko speaks again, sounding resigned. “So the short answer for others learning it is ‘probably not,’ then? I did wonder why it hasn’t been done before, and guessed from the effect it had on Mr. Verres that it was simply too dangerous a tactic to use in common circumstances.”

“No, that’s a whole different matter, unique to Psychic Red’s abilities,” Leader Sabrina says, and gives Red what seems to Leaf an apologetic look. “He is uncommonly vulnerable to spiritual attacks for reasons that are complex and unimportant for the general topic. What matters more, I believe, is that the ability to copy an emotion and project it at once was what taxed him so, in addition to the effects of the scream that overwhelmed Psychic Jean’s defenses. If Miss Juniper were a psychic and attempted it, she likely would not have been as affected, which is why learning this frame of mind, if it’s possible to do so, would be potentially a great benefit.”

People are looking at Leaf again, and she lifts her chin. “I’d be happy to try and teach it to whoever wants to learn. I’ve posted a few articles on it since our abra captures, to try and do so through writing, but if a psychic has to learn from me directly then it seems worth my time, if it means more people are equipped to handle something like this happening again.”

She takes a breath. “That said, I do think it would be more difficult than most might expect.” She glances at Red, who nods. “There are fundamental values underlying what I focused on both with the abra and in the tower, that I don’t believe can be believed in as is convenient. I don’t think those values can’t be learned, but I want to caution people from thinking they can just… pick it up, and remain unchanged.”

“Ominous,” someone mutters, and the room chuckles again.

Leaf feels her own face grow hot, even though she knows nothing personal was meant by it. What she said was ominous, but she needs this to be taken seriously…

“I’m assuming this has something to do with the project you’re working on,” Professor Oak asks, and she sees encouragement in his bright blue gaze. “Can you elaborate, Leaf?”

“Sure.” This conversation is going to be public record, and listened to by millions of people. She needs to take advantage of that. “For those that don’t know, I have very strong beliefs about pokemon welfare. I don’t engage in trainer battles, don’t eat any pokemon, and much of my time is spent helping care for those that have been abandoned. I even suspended my journey to focus on a new project that might someday solve much of the dangers humans face from wild pokemon, permanently.”

The room is silent, and she doesn’t need to be psychic to pick up on people’s confusion, shock, and skepticism. “All of which is to say,” she presses on, “That the convictions I hold are deep ones. I didn’t pick them up for some reward or personal benefit, and I’m skeptical that using it in such a way would work.”

This time the silence has more of a thoughtful feel, going off the expressions she can see. Eventually Professor Elm leans forward, adjusting the glasses on his narrow nose. “Have you been changed by the experience, Mr. Verres? I understand that your ability to mirror the mental states of others is somewhat unique, but has already been taught in part to Leader Sabrina and some of her other pupils.” He looks between Red and Sabrina, now. “Has anyone noticed any such side effects?”

Leaf can tell, now, that Red’s nervousness is about the subject matter. This is getting dangerously close to the sensitive topics they talked about on the cruise, and the fact that two powerful psychics are in the room makes Leaf wonder if Red is debating how honest he should be.

She realizes the psychics might already be communicating with each other about this very thing, and feels a moment of jealousy, wishing she could send Red mental support and reassurance. It’s strange to think of such a private conversation being layered on top of a situation like this… but then again, any of the others fiddling with their phones or on laptops at the moment could be having one too.

“I don’t think I can give an objective answer,” Red finally says. “Leaf is one of my closest friends, and we’ve spent a lot of time talking about our beliefs. I’ve found some of her arguments convincing enough to alter my diet so that it’s closer to hers, and from the inside this feels distinct from the feelings I’ve mirrored from her… but I can’t with any confidence say there’s been no effect. As for the other psychics in Saffron, as far as I know none have tried it with ideological beliefs.”

Leader Sabrina nods. “That’s my experience as well, and I’ve detected no permanent changes to ice cream preference yet.”

Another chuckle moves around the room, and though she’d been waiting for it throughout the meeting, the sound of Giovanni’s voice still takes Leaf by surprise. “As Sabrina and her pupils are already pursuing this avenue of study, I suggest we leave it to them to continue to do so. I trust they’ll let us know when it’s time for more robust studies to be done, or if collaboration with other psychics or researchers would be helpful?”

“Of course,” Sabrina says, and turns to Leaf. “I’d be happy for your participation, if you can spare the time.”

Leaf nods, and the conversation moves on to other things, but the exchange doesn’t sit right with her. Leaf glances at Giovanni, unsure of what she’s feeling other than vague suspicion and dissatisfaction. The Viridian Leader has been sitting quietly the whole meeting, alternating between listening attentively or fiddling with his phone, the same way he did while speaking with her. It doesn’t make her feel any better about that, even if the other big names in the room are also checking their phones or typing into them on occasion.

“What’s wrong?” Blue mutters at her side.

“Nothing.” Everything Giovanni said seems sensible enough. No one else objected, and it’s also probably Red’s preference, keeping things in his and Sabrina’s control. She knows he and Red would say she’s just being paranoid because of her past experience with him… okay, they probably wouldn’t say it, but they’d think it.

And they’d probably be right. She takes a moment to imagine Giovanni said the opposite, that the research should be done by new people, and she has to admit that she’d be suspicious of that too.

Okay, so I have a bias against him. Doesn’t mean I’m wrong to be wary.

Blue is frowning at her, and Red leans in from the other side, brow creased. “You don’t want to work with us?”

“It’s not that. But…” She tries to put it into words, the worry that continuing as they have been is a mistake. What she’s done has gone from a handy trick to catch rare pokemon, to something that can stop real threats. They have to make sure they’re exploring every avenue, not just trusting one group to get things right. “What if something about Sabrina’s… style… isn’t compatible with it? You’re already working with her, maybe we should, you know. Diversify.”

She expects Red to object, but he just looks thoughtful, then distracted. Eventually he leans toward her and murmurs, “It’s a good idea. You should bring it up.”

“Really? You’re not worried about…” She lowers her voice even further. “You know, people getting scared of psychics manipulating them?”

“What?” Blue says from her other side, and she holds up her index finger to tell him to wait a minute.

“The cat’s out of the ball now,” Red says with a shrug. “Maybe Sabrina will be against it, but you should still bring it up.”

Leaf nods, feeling relieved, then turns to Blue and summarizes what she said, minus the worry about society being scared of psychics, since that would be a longer conversation and she wants to start paying attention to the one the rest of the room is having again.

That turns out to be an exploration of the tactics used to defend the tower, the decisions Sergeant Iko made (which she’s glad to see no one is blaming him for, and is also glad that, when Jason tries to blame himself, a number of people speak out in his defense), an analysis of the new tactics the ghost used and how trainers could defend against it if it’s fought again, and a further examination of the issue with the cubone and marowak population around the tower, which was largely destroyed.

They break for lunch, also provided by Pallet Labs, and Blue steps away to introduce Maria to someone while Leaf tries to find an opportunity to bring up her counter-offer. She considers approaching Professor Oak, but he’s busy speaking with others, and when she looks around for someone else to talk to about it her gaze falls on a surprisingly unoccupied Giovanni, who’s eating with one hand as his other holds his phone, thumb tapping away.

A quiet voice inside worries that a private conversation would rob her of the support she might need, and it’s not like he’s in charge of what other psychics do… but she recognizes the real fear the voice represents. Fear of pitting herself against the focused, relentless will of a Leader, let alone one like Giovanni.

And she just had an idea, a risky idea but this has been bothering her for months now and when is she going to get another opportunity?

She stands before she can let herself be intimidated, and wipes a sweaty palm on her napkin as she murmurs, “Hey, Red?” He’s busy discussing something with Artem, so she taps his shoulder until he turns. “Do me a favor, if you can? Keep your senses on me, and let me know if someone else tries to skim my thoughts or merge.”

Red blinks at her, mouth full, then looks at Giovanni, then back at her, chews, swallows. “You want me to come with you?” he whispers.

Yes! “No.” She tries to smile through her nervousness, genuinely warmed by his support. “Thanks, I just want to make sure he’s not cheating this time. Assuming he was last time.” The Viridian Leader entered the room alone, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t bring someone else to the building.

“You got it.” Red turns back to Artem and tells him he needs to use the restroom—such a bad liar—then gets up, presumably to go somewhere nearby where he can concentrate.

“Oh, Red…” Her phone is already on silent, and she turns the vibration all the way up, then puts it in her pocket. “Send me three quick messages if you sense something.”

He nods, and she starts walking toward the Leader. Second thoughts immediately assail her… maybe people aren’t talking to him because he’s notorious for preferring no interruptions while he eats. Maybe he’s just going to act like she’s a silly girl who should trust the leading psychic authority in the region—

—no, from what she knows of him he doesn’t belittle others like that. She needs to expect him to be supportive even when he pushes for getting his way, perhaps praising her for her idea while still making it seem clear that it would be a mistake.

She rehearses what she’ll say right up until the moment he turns to her, gaze flicking from his phone to her face and back, then nods in greeting. “Miss Juniper.”

“Leader. I hope I’m not imposing?”

“No, though if this is concerning the last thing we discussed, I hope you’ll understand if I defer discussing it to another setting? Rest assured, I haven’t forgotten that I’m close to owing you payment for your previous work.”

Leaf hasn’t forgotten it either, though she has wondered how to best approach him about it, and how she’d feel about accepting it given what she’s told Laura. She wonders if a psychic is in her mind now (other than Red) and quickly focuses on something else. “It’s not, though I would be happy to revisit that topic another time, if you’re free. This is about the psychic testing of my mental state.”

At last his eyes move to hers and stay. They’re only mostly as intimidating as she remembers. “You’ve changed your mind?”

Her pulse speeds up, but her phone still hasn’t buzzed in her pocket. Come on, it doesn’t take a psychic to guess that. “I think it would be better to diversify who’s trying it.”

“That seems reasonable.” He’s looking at his phone again, and she feels herself relax slightly, then chides herself for doing it. His words don’t surprise her, however, one of the things she reminded herself to expect was quick capitulation, followed by— “But why approach me on it? I only made a suggestion, it would be up to other psychics to volunteer their time. I imagine most would jump at the opportunity.”

“I was wondering, since it was your suggestion, whether you had some extra reason for it that I hadn’t considered. But if you agree, I’ll bring it up.”

It sounds weak, saying it out loud, and part of her realizes with chagrin that even if he does use psychics to scan the thoughts of people he needs to convince of things that this might not rise to that level of necessity.

As she’s sweating over all this, Leader Giovanni simply purses his lips as he reads something, scrolls with his thumb, then says, “I believe it’s prudent to focus your time on the most accomplished and promising psychics, and Sabrina has already put effort into consolidating all those without other pressing needs on their time under one roof. As such it seemed the most efficient route, but it’s your time to spend as you see fit.” He looks at her again. “It’s a valuable commodity, in case you haven’t realized.”

“My time?”

“Specifically your ability to teach this technique to others. I wouldn’t blame you in the slightest if you decided to charge for the opportunity to learn it.”

Even having prepared herself for this kind of manipulation she feels heat rising in her cheeks. “No, I haven’t. It didn’t occur to me.” It probably would have, given more time to consider it, but after what they experienced at the tower the idea of asking for payment to keep something like it from happening again feels unthinkable.

His brow twitches. “Then I can only commend your altruism. But I know Sabrina will offer you money for your time, as you’re not a psychic who will benefit yourself from your time spent with her, and that’s also part of why I suggested her. It’s not often you’ll find a skilled psychic who isn’t at least moderately wealthy, but she would also pay for her students, who are exceptions due to their dedication to self-development and research.”

Despite herself, Leaf finds herself smiling, not at the prospect of being paid but in simple admiration. How do people get this good? Are there lessons somewhere she can sign up for? Does anyone teach defense against it? He’s just so damn reasonable that she now thinks the part of her wanting to keep resisting is just being stubborn.

And the worst part is, for a second she could swear she sees a slight crinkle at the corners of his eyes, a slight curl to his lip. It could just be general pleasantness, a natural reaction to her smile, but even with her phone’s continued stillness, even knowing he’s Dark, part of her is convinced he knows why she’s smiling, and is letting her know he knows.

This was a terrible idea.

But she doesn’t regret it. “I’ll consider it some more. Thank you for your time.”

“Thank you for yours. Outside my specialty though it is, do let me know if there’s something I can do to help in your endeavor.”

“I will.” A rush of boldness has her speaking again before she can second-guess herself. “And if there are any updates on what we talked about before that are safe to share, I hope I’ve proven myself discreet enough to hear them. I’m not as focused on journalism as I was before, but I may still be able to help.”

Now he does smile, briefly. “You have, and it seems a reasonable request. I’ll consider it in return.”

“Thank you, Leader. Enjoy your meal.” She bows her head the way she’s seen others in Kanto do, then heads back to her seat, pulse still racing. She starts eating again, barely tasting the room temperature salad, and a minute later Red sits beside her.

The look on his face makes her blush, and she covers her eyes with one hand. “You don’t have to tell me I made a fool of myself.”

“Hey, this is all admiration. I mean I’m glad he doesn’t use psychics that way, or at least I’m glad this instance didn’t provide us evidence of that… assuming he doesn’t, if he does then I wouldn’t be glad to not get evidence… anyway, my point is I wasn’t really that worried for you, but you clearly were, and you did it anyway. At some points it felt like you were being threatened, and you still didn’t back down! That took guts.” He blinks. “Uh, he wasn’t actually threatening you, right?”

Now she’s blushing for two reasons. “No. It wasn’t that exciting a conversation, really. But thanks.”

“What’d he say, then? You going to diversify?”

She sighs. “I don’t know. I guess there’s no rush to make a decision right now, and it’ll be nice to work with you and Jason more, and your other friends.”

“Eehh, I wouldn’t call them all friends…”

“Yo,” Blue says as he takes his seat beside her. “What were you talking to Giovanni about?”

She summarizes for both of them, then listens to them argue the pros and cons, and then the lunch break ends and conversations resume around more aspects of the attack, such as the technology behind the goggles. Apparently Silph Corp. was invited to attend and discuss the technology, but declined, and someone makes a snide remark about sour grapes before Professor Oak moves them quickly along to discussing other avenues of research into “room wide” attacks or effects that pokemon can create.

The talks go on for hours, and Leaf starts to notice more and more people’s focus flagging, and her own mind drifting to whether they’ll have another break soon, right up until Professor Oak says, “So, last but not least… origin.”

The room’s attention seems to sharpen, and Red visibly perks up beside her, as does Artem beside him. Elite Agatha rests her chin on folded hands, peering thoughtfully into the distance. “We can assume, I believe, that one of the buried marowak provided the material for the spirit to possess and manifest,” she says. “From the records, there was exactly one, and we may yet learn something about its history that becomes important. Morty and I will do our best to find any clues in the spirit realm, while the mayor leads the investigation into the tower’s records.”

The mayor in question is an old Kanto native with long silver hair and a black robe of some kind, perhaps a sign of mourning for the rangers who were lost. She can’t tell if he serves some religious function to the community along with being its mayor, and so far he’s spoken only sparingly in a strong but dusty voice. “Along with our search through the records, we’re also coordinating with the rangers to discover whether someone did anything on the top floor that might have acted as a trigger for the ghost’s materialization, or if it’s related to the higher frequency of ghost sightings before their sudden disappearance. Police will also look into the reports of more frequent strangers around and inside the tower over the past few weeks, and we will soon put out a general call for information related to this, however minor.”

“Be sure to emphasize that there is no blame attached,” Giovanni says. “We want to encourage people to come forward if they did something that led to this.”

The mayor’s brow creases. “Are you suggesting blanket amnesty, Leader? Even if there was ill intent?”

“I am.”

“Seconded,” Professor Oak says. “Unless anyone thinks it likely someone could create a new pokemon on purpose?” He looks around the room, waiting for any response. None comes. “So until we find evidence otherwise, we should operate under the assumption we aren’t dealing with renegade activity. Even if whatever was done wasn’t innocuous, we don’t want to frighten them out of coming forward or naming their friends or family members who committed some other crime if it means we may better understand what happened.”

The mayor hesitates, fingers of one hand rubbing the cloth of his sleeve, then nods. Leaf tries to see it from his perspective; what if the incident that led to the pokemon appearing was the theft of some venerated tomb in the tower, or even a murder at the wrong place and wrong time? It would seriously undermine the rule of law to not punish such a crime at all, even without taking into consideration the consequences of it.

But while he’s the highest authority on local civil matters, to go against the advice of two such prominent people could be bad for his career. And it is important to make sure they understand what happened, if they can… if something like a murder could cause a ghost pokemon to appear, it may be worth letting the murderer go to find that out. It’s not like anyone would trust them again, and police would be watching them closely afterward.

“Excuse me.” Artem raises his hand, and the room’s attention shifts to him. “There’s something I’ve been looking into that might be worth discussion, if that topic is covered?”

“It is, for now,” the mayor says. “You are?”

“Artem Mateush. I’m a researcher who fought at the tower, and… while we were searching the grounds for ghost pokemon, before we went in, Jean got a false positive that turned out to be unown. Did anyone else notice them?”

The room is silent for a moment, and then Red and Jason agree that they did. “You think it’s related?” Professor Oak asks.

“I think it’s worth investigating.”

Red’s hand rises to rub his temple as he turns toward Artem. “If unown can cause new pokemon to manifest, wouldn’t we have noticed by now? New pokemon would be showing up around the ruins they used to populate.”

“I know, I even checked some records and, as far as I could tell from a night’s worth of research, the few locations where they could be reliably found in the past don’t have a higher than average rate of new pokemon species being discovered. But! Many of those locations are remote, and they’re not being constantly monitored, so I don’t think it’s that strong of evidence against. Also, most pokemon appear in the wild, so maybe the few that arise rarely in towns or cities do so when some unown are flying around above them.”

Leaf can’t see Red’s expression, but she can hear his skepticism. “What about how common they’ve been elsewhere since the incident in Hoenn? We’re not seeing new species pop up everywhere.” His hand is still rubbing, two fingers pressing hard as if to alleviate a headache.

“True, but we also don’t know the rate at which new pokemon appeared before the incident.” Artem turns to Professor Oak. “I mean, I don’t think we do?”

“Just estimates, and very broad ones,” the Professor says. “Kanto in particular hasn’t had any native species discovered in my lifetime, before this. It’s rare enough, in general, that I don’t see the lack of new species showing up since the incident as indicative that unown aren’t involved… and it does seem meaningful that the first new species since the incident would be here, with unown sightings up around the islands, but not around the world.”

The conversation continues, but Leaf is distracted, watching with rising concern as Red rests his elbows on the table, both hands massaging his temples now. “Red? You okay?”

“Yeah,” he mutters. “Just…” He shakes his head, eyes closed. “Flashback. Strong.”

Shit. “We should let Agatha know.”

“No, it’s normal. Just stronger than usual… fragmented…”

“Fragmented? What does that mean?”

“I don’t know, exactly. Just the best word that fits.” He takes his pocket journal out, flipping to a new page and starting to write. She wants to keep asking questions, but maybe she shouldn’t distract him if what he’s doing is helpful… and he does seem less pained, now, though it’s hard to tell when he has a look of such deep concentration.

“…Wally’s expertise from the Hoenn incident,” Artem is saying when she tunes back in. “Plus, spotters are working around the islands to track their movements, so I can reach out, see if they’ve got anything that can help us.”

Professor Oak nods and looks around the room. “That goes for the rest of the topics we’ve brought up today too.” He smiles at Blue, some of the proud grandparent that always seems to be simmering beneath the surface leaking through. “This new network of interregional collaboration has the potential to be even more powerful than the pokedex. We’ve got some exciting mysteries to tackle, and some frightening ones, but none of us are doing it alone, and that’s always been our strength. Reach out, learn from each other, share what you discover… and someone, somewhere, will figure it out, sooner or later.”

“Well said.” The room’s attention shifts to Giovanni, who stands. For a second Leaf thinks he’s going to start the exodus out of the room as people leave or take another break, but instead he says, “If I may expand on the point, before we conclude?”

When Leaf glances back at Professor Oak, he seems curious, maybe a little apprehensive, if she’s not projecting too much, but he nods.

“The Professor spoke the truth when he said our strength is our ability to work together.” The Viridian Leader clasps his hands behind his back as his gaze slowly sweeps the room. “Drop any single human, no matter how well educated, how focused, how fit, into the untamed wilds, and they will likely be dead within a day. If they somehow survive the pokemon, they still must learn to survive the elements. Not just the cold of winter or a sudden forest fire, but simply finding edible food or drinkable water might also kill them.”

Giovanni starts to walk around the room, and people’s heads turn to watch him. “Drop two humans together, and one can learn from the other’s mistakes. They can care for each other if one gets sick or injured. Drop more and they can start to specialize, play to their strengths. Drop still more after them, and they can teach what they’ve learned in a fraction of the time it took to learn it, without the risks. This is the true secret to our success. A community is formed, one that can pass its knowledge down generation to generation, until everyone has even forgotten how they learned this berry is safe and that poison, or that the poison berry is in fact edible so long as you first seed it, cook it, and wait at least three days, but no more than ten. It becomes common knowledge, just another building block of society, and unless they make an effort to immortalize them, over time they won’t even remember the lives lost in trial and error to attain that knowledge.”

He stops walking, turns to Iko, and bows his head. The sergeant seems unsure how to respond, for a moment, then simply dips his head in return.

“Only four lives were lost yesterday,” Giovanni continues. “Four human lives, that is, and dozens of pokemon. But even as we mourn them, we must remember that their deaths were not without meaning. They were in fact a precious gift, to give us the time and opportunity to learn what new things might kill us, and most important of all, to teach our children, so that we can keep them safe.”

He turns to Leaf, suddenly, and smiles ever-so-slightly, not just at her but at Blue and Red as well. “Or in this case, for our children to teach us.”

And he bows his head again, and Leaf finds herself smiling even as her face flushes, smiling in begrudging admiration as she wonders once again, as the room full of experts of all kinds bows their heads to her and her friends, how she could learn to do that.

Pokemon: The Origin of Species, Uncategorized

Chapter 89: Hearing Shouts


Leaf studies the Lavender Tower blueprints on her phone and expands the markings near the top, where the lip of the tower rooftop edges out over the tower walls. “I think it’s within range,” she says, and looks up at Sergeant Iko, who’s nodding.

“One person stationed above each window, then, to catch it if it tries to flee. No goggles on those though, I have exactly nine dark trainers here, and I’ll want each of them to use a pair—”

He’s cut off by the sound of a sob, and they all turn to the ranger that made the sound. He’s leaning over his equipment, hands over his face. One of his peers walks over to put a hand on his shoulder and he straightens, looking embarrassed as he rubs at his eyes. “I’m sorry, I’m not sure what’s gotten into me…”

Leaf doesn’t respond, sympathizing completely. It all feels so overwhelming, suddenly, and she misses Aiko, and her—wait, what—

“Blue, Leaf, come in!”

Red’s sudden (loud) voice in her ear makes Leaf flinch, and she’s aware of Blue doing the same as he reaches up to adjust his volume. “We’re here, Red, what’s wrong?”

“The ghost at the top of the tower is sending out a… a psychic scream or something, just pouring all of what it feels out, way stronger than it should.” Red is panting between words, which combined with the rhythm of them makes her picture him running. She sees the captain frowning at them and holds a hand up. “I think they’re going to come, any ghosts that can feel it, they’ll come to feast, and they might not be picky about what they target.”

“I think we’re feeling it down here too,” Leaf says while Blue quickly summarizes for the sergeant. “What do we do, Red?”

“We have to capture it, now, before we get overwhelmed.”

“There are barely any ghosts in the area,” Sergeant Iko says, voice echoing in Leaf’s ear. Blue must have given him their channel frequency.

“We don’t know how far it’s reaching, Sergeant.” Jason’s voice sounds thick, like he’s been crying. “It may draw in ghosts from the entire town.”

“Then it’ll be a siege, while a strike team with the goggles go after the source,” Iko says, then mutes himself from the channel and turns to the rest of the room, voice cutting across the hum of voices. “Ghosts incoming, masks on, upward retreat! Move move move!”

The men and women freeze in place for a second, more than just the one who was crying looking like they’re being snapped out of an unpleasant dream, and then they all scramble to replace their supplies and put on gas masks. As they start summoning pokemon Iko goes among them, barking orders for someone to warn Oak, Agatha, and the other big names.

Leaf does her best to tune it all out as she straps her own mask on, trying to focus on what Red said. “How are you shielding it, Red? If it’s a Ghost attack—”

“I don’t think it is an attack, it’s just… communicating, loudly. Blue, are you—”

“I’m getting something.” He’s summoned Eevee again, and Leaf brings Raff out. “Not sure I’d be able to tell what it was if you hadn’t said anything, but Iko confirmed that dark rangers also couldn’t stay on the top floor anyway, so it may not be the main danger.”

“We’re heading up now,” Leaf says as they start following the flow of rangers moving for the stairs. Someone rushes past them in the other direction, probably to alert whoever is at the door, and Leaf’s heart starts pounding with a delayed burst of adrenaline. This is it. She knew it was a possibility when she left the ranch, but now she has to face wild pokemon and maybe hurt them, and against opponents she can’t incapacitate as easily as most. “Once the source of the… scream… is dealt with, the threat should be over, right?”

“No,” Jason says. “They might seek the source of it even after it ends.”

“Why are we going up at all?” Blue asks as their footfalls join the cacophony of others thundering up the stairs. “Why not just evacuate and let the ghosts come and get it?”

“We don’t know what will happen,” Leaf pants. The rangers’ pokemon are a mix of Ghost and lithe, agile Dark types like liepard and thievul, which are clearly used to indoor movement, but Raff and Eevee struggle a bit to climb the stairs quickly, and Leaf reminds herself to do more training indoors with him instead of relying on sims. “Even assuming they don’t go on a feeding frenzy throughout the town, we can’t just let it die!”

“Leaf’s right, it’s a new species!”

Not what she meant, but she’ll take it. The rangers’ job is to protect both people and pokemon, so she hopes that’s what’s on Sergeant Iko’s mind too.

The feelings of sadness and grief get worse the higher they go, but to Leaf they never become debilitating, and even the rangers that were affected more strongly seem to be coping okay. Soon they reach the second to last floor, where the others are waiting for them.

“—already pokemon arriving,” Jason is saying to Sergeant Iko as Leaf gets close enough to hear. The rangers are spreading out with their pokemon, presumably to cover the various windows and stairways. The medium definitely looks like he’s been through some ordeal, but his voice is steady. “Not ghosts yet, likely cubone and marowak from the graveyard.”

“Why would—”

“They’re attracted to grief,” Leaf says, and everyone turns to her. “Sorry, thinking out loud… they’re scavengers, right? Grief signals food, maybe they think there’s a feast waiting for them up here. But it doesn’t really fit, it’s not like a giant speaker making crying sounds, and they’re not psychic, so… they’d just be feeling sad, right?”

“I can’t tell how they feel,” Jason says. “The scream is too piercing, I could only tell they were not ghosts, and inferred the rest from what other pokemon are native to the area.”

“Even that’s impressive,” Red says. “Bringing my shields down at all feels like it would quickly overwhelm me.”

“I feel nearly the same,” Jean says, putting what seems like a consolatory hand on Red’s shoulder, probably because of the slight bitterness that he’d spoken with. “I’m afraid none of our gifts except Jason’s will be of much help going forward.”

“Then join the defense here,” Iko says, and turns to the rest of the rangers. “Need a strike team to see if the goggles protect us against whatever it’s doing up top. If not, head back down and join the rest of us in holding out as best we can until the heavy hitters get here. Hopefully they’re dropping everything and porting over, but it still might take some time for them to grab the right pokemon and then get here from wherever their teleporters are registered. Those of you that are Dark, grab a pair of goggles and head up now.”

Leaf watches Blue immediately step forward, expression determined, and remembers the first real fight she witnessed between him and Red. That Blue, not much younger than this one, would have hesitated to reveal that about himself, and she wonders what gives him the confidence to now. A change in perspective from all his new experiences? His time in a leadership role? Or maybe he’s just been in the limelight enough, gained enough prestige, that he doesn’t feel as worried about potential prejudice.

Either way, she feels proud of him, and steps forward to give him a hug. “Be careful.” She doesn’t like that they’re splitting up, but she knows it’s the right call.

“You too,” he says with a smile. “And—”

“‘Take care of Red,’ yeah, I know.” She grins at the old joke, but it quickly fades when she remembers that they were Aiko’s last words to Elaine at Leaf’s hospital bed.

“I’d like to join them,” Jason says, and Leaf turns to see him talking to Sergeant Iko. “I won’t require my own goggles.”

Iko studies Jason a moment while Red frowns at Leaf’s side, looking like he wants to object. But he keeps his silence, and eventually the sergeant nods. “Fine with me, so long as you know what you can and can’t handle.” He turns to the rest of them. “My people all have strong anti-Ghost pokemon, so I’ve prioritized putting them on the windows. Do the rest of you think you can help me cover the stairs?” Leaf nods along with the others. “Good. You two, you’re with me on the first layer. You three, second layer.” He turns back to the rangers. “Split into pairs to cover the windows, clockwise starting with you two. Move out.”

Leaf is in the second layer, so she lets Jean and Artem step forward and join Sergeant Iko before she starts following with Red and Maria. Red is craning his neck back to look at Blue and Jason as they climb toward the top floor, while Iko and Jean talk quietly among themselves. Artem is already spraying himself with repel, and offers it back to Maria when he finishes, who then hands it to Leaf.

“Thanks.” Leaf sprays her clothing and sees Raff wrinkle his nose and walk a little further from her, which makes her smile despite the tension running through her. Balls train pokemon to be desensitized to the smell, but her ivysaur has always been a creature of comfort and hedonism wherever possible. It makes her feel guilty, suddenly, for bringing him here after the life of leisure he’s had for the past few months, and she has to remind herself to get her head in the game; they’re here to help others, and he’s one of her strongest pokemon. She could keep him safe and comfortable, but then he wouldn’t be able to change anything in the world, and while he didn’t exactly volunteer for danger, neither did any of the people or wild pokemon they’re trying to save.

And if another threat like the Hoenn myths is really appearing here, a peaceful life on the ranch may not be possible anyway.

Once they reach the stairway, Iko and Jean go down to start setting traps while Artem uses another bottle of repel on the stairway. She hopes whatever is driving them to come here isn’t strong enough to get them to push past the chemicals, but somehow she knows it will be. She wishes she spent more time studying cubone psychology, wishes she could find a way to stop them… Joy won’t help here, the singing would stop them from being able to defend themselves against ghosts, who wouldn’t be affected…

“Red, could we scare them off?” she asks.

“Been thinking about predators, but none of their natural ones use sound to communicate. We could try venusaur roars?”

“Do it,” Iko says from the stairwell as he dumps water out of his canteen on the stairs below him, then carefully directs his froslass to Ice Beam it. “May not work on all of them, but if it scares off even a few it’s worth it.”

Red and Leaf move together to put their speakers at the edge of the stairs and sync them to his pokedex. Soon the venusaur cries are echoing down the stairs, making Raff go still and focus entirely on the stairwell, as if expecting one of his kind to jump into sight at any moment. Hopefully the effect is as pronounced on the approaching cubone, if that’s what they are.

Jean and Iko reach the top of the stairs, having laid all sorts of traps on the stairs below them: sleep powder and stun spores, spikes and stealth rocks, sticky webs and patches of ice. Leaf has never seen so many defensive preparations put into a single location, and for a minute she allows herself to hope it will be enough.

And then they wait.

Five breaths. Ten. Fifteen. The sound of each exhale within her mask is all she hears, along with the constant loop of the recorded venusaur roars, and Leaf wonders how the team that went upstairs is doing, wonders just how direct the compulsion is (are there cubone spread out around each floor below them, milling aimlessly around?), wonders if any of the rangers stationed at the windows are fighting off ghosts yet (would she hear them over the looped recording?)… but mostly she just stares at the stairwell and focuses on her breathing, trying to keep herself ready for the moment something happens…

…twenty breaths…

…twenty-five…

…and then she hears it.

Just a vague sound, at first, a faint, wavering tone that rises and falls even as it echoes from countless throats.

“Crying” is how the pokedex described it, and when she played the audio files she had to admit that yes, the way the cubone family communicates sounds pretty close to how humans sound when they cry. And like human crying, there’s a range; heart wrenching sobs, sad and pitiful sniffles, prolonged moans of pain, and the wails of deep and haunting grief.

What she’s hearing right now, over the roars of the venusaur recordings, is all of it. Louder by the second, the storm of “grief” echoes up the stairway from the pokemon on the floor below, getting louder by the second, and a deep and primal fear works its way up her spine even as her heart breaks at the sound of what she can only identify as pain.

And then the pitch changes, takes on notes of alarm as a clamoring is heard from the stairwell, and her stomach roils as she imagines a group of cubone and marowak struggling through the traps. Some are designed to simply knock them out or keep them stuck on the stairs, but she knows even they might get trampled by the ones running up behind them.

She only has a moment to wish she’d put earplugs in before the first two bone masks rise into view, followed by three more, and the battle begins.

Blue is at the back of the group heading to the top floor, likely because the other rangers feel they need to protect him and Jason. He doesn’t mind that so much—certainly not as much as he would have earlier in his journey—but it does mean he doesn’t get to see what’s happening when people at the front of the group start to curse or cry out in surprise, particularly since they come to an abrupt halt while doing so.

The fact that it’s rangers that are shocked to literal stillness only makes him a little less impatient to see what’s causing it himself.

“Dai?” someone just ahead of Blue asks. “Phoebe? Everything alright up there?”

“It’s… yeah,” a guy, presumably Dai, responds. “The walls are weird.”

“The… what?”

There’s the sound of steps above, and then people start moving again. Blue hurries up, practically standing on tiptoe to try and see past the rangers (he’s grown about two inches since they left Pallet Town and cannot wait to get even taller), until finally the two directly in front of him reach the top, pause for their own moment of shock, then step forward enough that he can see…

The walls are weird.

That’s one way to put it, alright. Through the tinted lenses of the goggles, Blue stares agape at the top floor of the tower. Iko described his experience as one where the walls seemed about to crush him; to Blue it’s like the walls aren’t even really walls.

It feels like he’s not in a building, but rather a cavern, the ceiling impossibly high, the boundaries distant and curved outward, as if the top of the tower was built into a massive sphere. But there are corners, his mind is insisting that he can trace the corners, and yet as soon as he looks away from them it all looks curved again…

Jason makes a sound from beside him, and Blue turns to see the medium standing with his eyes tightly closed. “You okay?”

“It’s surreality,” Jason says through gritted teeth. “The whole floor… the walls and ceiling, the pokemon is somehow… stretched over all of it… or influencing all of it…”

Blue turns back toward the bizarre sight and focuses on individual objects. A pair of benches, the handle of an individual crypt drawer, a pot of flowers… unlike the lower floors there are a lot of unmarked squares in the wall for future interment, though a few of the marble squares have nameplates already above their handles. He can see those clearly enough, in fact whatever he focuses on seems fine… but everything in his periphery gets distorted.

“Do you need to go back down?” he asks even as a small, mad part of him wants to take the goggles off and see what the room looks like without them.

“Not yet. I have an idea…” He pulls a ball from his belt and braces his arm. “Go, Lampent.” A tint of blue is added to everything as the ghostly lamp appears, and after a moment Jason nods. “I can navigate with its senses.”

“I thought you had to be shielded?”

“Red and Jean do. I’m alright as long as I don’t try to merge with the ghost causing all this.” He starts moving forward again, and Blue does too, only to jump as they hear roaring from behind them, distant but echoing up the stairwell.

The rangers react as well, swivelling to face the new potential threat (all except for the rangers furthest from the stairs, who quickly turn again to keep their eyes on what’s now everyone’s backs), and after a moment Blue realizes what he’s hearing.

“Is that… a venusaur?” Gale asks. Blue was surprised she turned out to be dark, considering she has such a strong ghost pokemon, but he supposes even with the handicap it makes sense to focus on them if you’re stationed here.

“It’s a recording,” he replies, grinning. “They’re trying to scare the cubone off.”

The sound repeats, then again, and people slowly relax and begin looking around at the various hallways branching out from their main one again. “Alright folks,” Dai says, “Search in pairs, call out if you find anything. Jabari, watch the stairs in case it tries to run down. We’ve got no one on windows, but we don’t know for sure if it can fly or not. If it can we’ll redeploy, assuming we don’t catch it right away. Questions…? Let’s move.”

They start to spread out, and Blue follows Jason, who follows his pokemon, which bobs ahead just above the ground like a child-sized lamp on invisible legs. It’s weird looking at a ghost directly without feeling surreality from it, almost like he stepped into a movie. “It’s not affected by all this?”

“Not like we are. It’s… think of it as a fish in a river. The current pulls or pushes, but it can still swim.”

“Natural environment advantage. Got it.” Blue looks at Eevee, who seems confused; she keeps taking a few tentative steps forward, then hopping to the side, then focusing on him and getting close, nose sniffing the air. At least she’s not walking into walls or anything. He focuses his attention on one floor tile at a time as they move forward, trying to ignore the way the rest of the ground seems to stretch out around him. “That mean ghosts always see things like this? With space being so… big?”

“Is that what you see? No, my lampent is experiencing something more like what Sergeant Iko described, with the walls feeling too close.” His voice sounds distant, clearly deep in concentration, but his feet move confidently, if slowly, forward. “Like space itself is unfolding around it as it moves forward… and when it looks back… it’s closed behind it again.”

Blue watches as the lampent turns in a slow circle while still moving steadily forward, its blue light stretching shadows around them. Blue has to force his attention on their surroundings again, but that’s no less distracting.

Focus up! You’ve dealt with Pressure twice, you can handle this. But in its own way this is worse: at least with Pressure he could trust his senses, and yet he still winces when he thinks of how close he was to that onix when he missed it. No matter how calm he feels now (and it’s not really that calm, all things considered), if a pokemon jumps out at them from around a corner right now, he would probably misjudge the distance for the throw.

Jason can call it surreality if he wants, but if it is, it’s on a whole different level than anything he’s heard of before. What Blue thinks of, suddenly, is the difference in Pressure intensity between the absol they cornered underground… and Zapdos.

Sweat slides down his neck, and he can hear his breathing echo louder in his mask. It should be more exciting, especially after months of wishing something important would happen to him (that he would stay conscious through), or rather that he could take part in something important (instead of missing the most important night in living memory (and not being there for his friends)) now that the scale of what “counts” as important has so drastically changed from the sorts of things that used to matter.

But if he thinks like that he’s going to do something stupid, like try to take charge in something he has no expertise in. It’s hard to shake the feeling that he’s not doing enough, and for a moment he wonders if there is Pressure at work here… but no, he remembers feeling this way in Viridian Forest too, and at Mt. Moon. Pressure only amplifies what’s naturally there.

He takes a deep breath, then lets it out. He can overcome this urge. He has to.

“Is there anything I should do?” he asks Jason as he looks down a hall to their right, gaze carefully staying on specific objects.

“What?”

“Anything different, I mean, to prepare, or while searching.”

The medium is quiet for a moment. Surprised he’s asking? Or maybe just thinking it over while trying to concentrate on his merger with his pokemon. “We don’t know anything about it, really, but I’m fairly sure it’s a non-living ghost. It may be possessing some object that seems commonplace here, and because you’re wearing those goggles—”

“I might not notice,” Blue finishes, feeling a chill as he quickly scans around him again, looking for eyes on a wall mounted lamp, or a face on the pattern of a flower vase… but everything looks normal. Well, so does Jason’s lampent… if he didn’t know it’s a pokemon and it wasn’t moving, would he recognize it as one, or would his eyes just pass over it? “Your ghost-vision would notice it though, right?”

Jason smiles, but it’s probably more from nerves than humor. “Yes, unless it has the ability to hide itself from others of its own kind.”

Great. “What about your powers? I know you can’t merge with it, but—”

“I know it’s around. Past that… things like proximity and direction have been impossible to judge since we reached this floor, and previously it was just… up. Which raises a disturbing possibility.”

Blue swallows the sarcastic remarks that rise up, trying not to let his own nerves get the better of him. “Which is…?”

“What if this entire floor is it?”

Blue stops, then turns to stare at Jason. “What the hell does that mean?”

“I’ve never seen surreality affect something beyond the pokemon itself, either the body for living pokemon or the possessed body of non-living ones. We know objects can become possessed and turned to pokemon, and it’s not as though there aren’t some pokemon large enough for multiple people to fit in. What if tales of haunted houses contain some truth? What if the very stones of this tower, specifically those that make up the floor, walls, and ceiling of this level, have become possessed?”

Blue is still staring at him, trying to ignore his growing sense of horror. Inside a pokemon. We might be inside a…

He has a very stupid idea, briefly, of trying to point an ultraball at the floor, but there’s no way that would work, to catch an onix or wailmer you need to be far enough that the whole pokemon is in the light cone of the lens, and he’s not even sure what that would mean in this case if Jason is right. Try to scan it all from outside the building? What would happen to the tower if the whole top floor gets sucked away? Could even a Heavy Ball hold all this stone in it? He thinks a steelix would weigh more than all this, but he’s not sure…

“We should warn the others,” Blue says, and wets his lip. “Maybe even leave, come up with another strategy… what if it’s getting ready to, you know, digest us, or something?”

“It was just a thought… but if you think we should give up the search…?”

His uncertainty and willingness to defer make Blue simultaneously more nervous and more decisive. “No.” The others are probably already fighting to buy them time, and he needs to use it. Blue starts moving again, eyeing their surroundings with even more care. “Hypothetically what would happen if we order our pokemon to attack the floor?”

“I was wondering the same thing. Do you want to try it?”

Blue stops moving again, trying to think of some risk he hasn’t considered. “If you think it’s okay…”

“I think the sooner we find the pokemon responsible for this the better.”

“Can you tell if the others are okay?”

“Just a moment… So far, yes. But more pokemon are coming, and while the ghosts are being stopped through the windows as they try to reach this level, one or the other can’t be held off forever.”

Blue nods, unclips the laser pointer from his belt, then turns to Eevee and points it at the wall in front of her. “Bash.”

The silver fox’s body goes rigid, and it opens its mouth wide before breathing out an orb of purple mist. It sails forward in utter silence, deteriorating as it goes, and to Blue’s warped perspective, it seems like it’s stretching as it passes out of his concentrated vision and into the periphery. He starts tracking it directly with his gaze so that it stays a sphere while the rest of the world stretches out, and instead it suddenly appears to speed up to hit the “far” wall a moment later, splashing harmlessly against the stone and leaving no mark as it fades like mist under sunlight.

Blue waits for a few quick heartbeats, then lets out a breath. “Does that mean much?”

“I’m not sure. It’s hard to imagine such a lack of reaction from something living and presumably hurt, but everything about this is new, even assuming I’m wrong.”

“Yeah.” If only they had a better way to identify if there’s a pokemon around and where it is that doesn’t rely on psychic powers… is there anything that can track Dark pokemon really well? Red or Leaf might know, but they’re downstairs…

There’s a yell of surprise from somewhere to their left, followed by, “It’s here!” and Blue grabs Jason’s arm before running back the way they came so they could take the main hallway toward the shouted commands and other sounds of battle.

The medium stumbles at first, but quickly catches his balance and runs alongside him. It’s hard to judge distances while moving so quickly, and he has to abruptly stop as they exit into the main hallway. Blue hears the stomp of heavy boots as everyone else converges on where the rangers are engaging the enemy…

…only for one shout in particular to cut off mid-word, followed by silence.

There’s still the hurried sounds of a dozen footsteps echoing through the halls, but soon Blue hears rangers shouting for the names of the one who called out, then their partner.

By the time he and Jason reach the others they’re searching one crypt-lined hall after another. Blue looks at Gale just as she turns to him, and even with her mask and goggles, he can see her fear.

“They’re gone. Just… gone.”

The first wave of onrushing marowak are hit by streams of water and beams of freezing light. The moment they go down another handful take their place, which get cut down by sharp leaves and psychic attacks, but they’re followed by another handful, and then another.

They’re all marowak so far, and even as Leaf orders Raff to send out another attack some part of her wonders if only marowak got called, before remembering what happened when Zapdos flew over Vermilion: the Pressure sent the fastest pokemon into the city first. There are likely still cubone coming, and many more of them than there are of their evolution.

A Razor Leaf bounces off a Marowak’s helmet but still causes it to flinch, and it’s knocked down from behind a moment later, only to tumble out of sight. Raff’s next attack slices into its target’s arm and makes it drop the bone club it was carrying. A moment later a jet of water sends it tumbling back into the marowak behind it, who clubs it out of the way only to be hit by an Ice Beam.

The speakers and repel don’t seem to be deterring them much, and soon the top of the stairway is covered in a mix of water and blood and leaves and dropped bones. Leaf wishes Raff had an attack that was less deadly that could reach the stairs, wishes she could swap with someone in front to start using stun spores instead, but she knows this is the most effective defensive line, and even it isn’t enough: before long a marowak gets through and swings at Iko’s froslass.

She weaves to the side and blasts it with an Ice Beam, but it still manages to club her alongside the head, sending a crack through the din of battle. Iko quickly swaps her out while someone else captures the marowak in a greatball, which rolls along the floor away from them as the battle continues.

The marowak that got through was the first sign that the water pokemon are running low, and once they’re replaced the battle becomes far less one-sided. Unable to put out the damage to keep the horde of marowak in check, Leaf realizes that they need a tank… but they’re hampered by the very thing keeping them safe: the size of the chokepoint. Anything big enough to cover the whole thing would be overwhelmed by the attackers on its own.

So when Iko yells, “New chokepoint, to the right!” and summons a slaking to cover half of it at an angle, Leaf is already moving alongside Red, Jean, Maria and Artem to help protect it. The relief that they won’t be overwhelmed just yet doesn’t stop the steadily growing sick feeling in her stomach. They must have taken down dozens of them by now, the bodies on the stairs are starting to pile up, and still more are coming…

And then, abruptly, the cubone are there, climbing over the bodies of the fallen marowak that came before them. Some attack the slaking fervently while others try to climb over it, their cries competing with the pained bellow of Iko’s pokemon as it rears back for a powerful swipe of its arm. Leaf shifts her position again and yells out a command for sleep powder, knocking out two cubone who climbed over the slaking before they could go any further. She quickly catches both, then takes out two more pokeballs as another skull-helmet appears above the slaking.

The speakers have been sufficiently smashed to stop the endless loop of venusaur roars, and now the cries of the cubone are that much louder. They’re even higher pitched and more like human babies than the marowak, and they’re so small…

Her heart feels like it’s being torn in two, and her eyes burn as she continues to throw out commands and pokeballs, trying to save as many as she can.

“Need a new tank!” Iko calls out.

“I’ve got one!” Red yells.

“Ready, set, swap!”

The bruised and bloody slaking is withdrawn, and in its place appears the kingler Red caught in Vermilion. Frothy streams of water shoot out of its mouth, knocking a few cubone down the stairs and causing a few more to slip and slide back as they try to climb the bodies of the fallen, and that heavy red claw catches another as it tries to run by it on the right, blood dripping as it closes shut, and Leaf has to look away, eyes burning.

It should have gotten easier, seeing this, experiencing it. After everything she’s been through, it should hurt less. But part of her is glad it doesn’t.

Unfortunately, kingler can’t carry a lot of water, and soon the sound of bones hitting shell fills the room. Leaf quickly summons Wise and commands the noctowl to keep up a steady whirlwind aimed at the stairwell from over the tank’s wide, squat body, then uses the brief respite to feed Raff some ether and checks to see how the others are doing.

Iko’s houndoom leaps from cubone to cubone, biting and kicking, while Maria’s tangela wraps multiple of them in vines that glow, absorbing the life from the cubone even as they try to hack their way free. Jean’s exeggcute use Bullet Seeds to assist from afar, while Artem’s claydol floats above them all, psychic attacks dropping any that try to get past.

They’re still holding, and still have four or five pokemon each. Surely they can last longer than however many pokemon are coming… but through it all, cubone are dying.

Some more balls are thrown, including her own at ivysaur’s targets, saving a few. But the floor is already littered with the dead, and Leaf’s horror rises as she notices the size of some of the unmoving bodies. A cubone’s health can be partially determined by the appearance of the exoskeletal “mask” they grow around their heads; the more bones they’ve ingested, the more complete it is, until it’s smooth and unblemished, signalling that the cubone is nearly ready to evolve into a marowak.

Some of the cubone in front of her barely have any mask, just a few thin plates of bone on their angular faces. Whatever’s driving them to do this, it’s bringing them all, down to the newborns.

And that’s when she realizes that defeating them all isn’t good enough: this has to stop. Some way, somehow… she has to stop it.

It’s easy to find the general site of the battle: there’s an ultraball lying against the wall of one of the side corridors. But after Blue checks to ensure that it’s empty, he studies the ground around it, then looks around and sees that there are three different directions it could have rolled here from, and no sign of violence anywhere. He even grabs a handle from one of the nearby crypts and pulls, a morbid part of him expecting to find one of the rangers crammed into it, but instead there’s just a series of elegant urns. He quickly closes it and walks back to Jason, careful to step around his lampent as it bobs by.

“Hope your pokemon sees something I didn’t, because if not we’ve got nothing to go on.” Blue feels wired, his pulse in his throat and his foot bouncing on the tile as he keeps looking around, half expecting something to pop out at them while his back is turned. The rangers are still searching nearby, while Gale tries calling the missing rangers’ phones, then locating their positions, without any apparent luck.

He’s getting used to navigating the weird dimensions of this place by being deliberate with his gaze, but Jason is still clearly having trouble moving from one place to another while relying on his pokemon’s senses, and so stays leaning against the corridor’s wall as he tilts his head toward Blue, eyes still closed. “No. But they saw something, before whatever happened, and I heard attack commands.”

“I did too, but without blood or ectoplasm or even a scuff mark, we may not know if we’re even looking in the right place. Our sense of sight is being tricked, maybe sound is—”

“New plan,” Gale calls out as the rangers re-converge nearby. “Two pairs of two, one person from both groups focused on keeping the others in sight. Blue, Jason, you’re with Haku and I. Our people have to be around here somewhere, let’s find them or the pokemon responsible before things get worse.”

Blue isn’t sure if Gale is being optimistic or just pretending to be, but he finds himself reassured by her certainty regardless. It also helps that her voice is coming out angry rather than scared, though he can’t imagine she’s any less afraid for her people and herself than he is, and somewhere in the back of his mind he makes a mental note to always appear confident for the sake of anyone he’s leading.

The others start pairing up, and he walks over to Gale and Haku as Jason follows his lampent toward them. “He’s seeing through his pokemon,” he explains when Gale frowns at the medium.

“Right then. Blue, keep your eyes on us while Jason watches your surroundings. We’re going to sweep the northern hallways one at a time, and if we still don’t find anything we’ll start knocking walls down.”

The people of Lavender wouldn’t appreciate that much, but he understands the sentiment, since he’d do the same thing if his friends were missing. They start searching again, and this time Blue and Jason stay in the main corridor while the rangers go up and down the halls, Haku looking around corners while Gale walks sideways, keeping her head swiveling between him and Blue. Blue makes sure to check on Jason every few seconds too, while the medium just stands nearby and keeps his pokemon turning to cover Blue’s blind spots.

“At least we know we’re not inside it, right?” Blue murmurs after a minute. The silence was setting him more on edge, or maybe it’s just the waiting. He wishes there was something in front of him to fight, so the battle calm would come. “Since they saw something.”

“As Red would say, I feel less sure of what I think I know and why I think I know it with every passing minute. And I think he would be surprised that I had more room to change in that direction.” Jason shakes his head. “Most ghosts don’t consume physical bodies but I don’t know what other form of attack would wipe away their presence so completely.”

Blue gets a brief mental image of two rangers and their pokemon being eaten by a floating, ghostly gulpin, its whole body turning into a massive mouth that stretches wide to swallow them whole as it swoops down on them, and he quickly looks up to check the ceiling again. “Even if they were… eaten… their phones should be trackable.” Unless they get immediately dissolved by some ghost-digestion-system…

“I could try getting its attention,” Jason says, voice uncertain. “I don’t know if it’s worth the risk, but…”

“I think it is,” Blue quickly says, then realizes that he might have meant risk to himself. “I mean, as long as it won’t permanently hurt you?”

“No, I don’t think so. But if there’s a chance that the two rangers can still be saved…”

“Yeah, hang on. Gale, Haku!” He waves them over, feeling disoriented again as he sees Haku approaching from what looks like the other side of a stadium while Gale walks down a simple hallway, and yet both arrive around the same time. “Jason thinks he can summon it to us.”

“I don’t know if it will come to us,” Jason clarifies. “But I think I can provoke a reaction, at least.”

Gale and Haku exchange looks, and Haku nods. “Do it,” Gale says. “Let’s move into a square first, everyone watching the person to their left.”

They do so while the other six rangers continue their search. Blue keeps his eyes on Gale despite the urge to watch Jason, he knows the medium isn’t going to start glowing or anything but if the ghost’s attention is focused on him it feels negligent not to be paying attention to him…

Trust others to make calls. Be part of the team.

He barely finishes having the thought before Jason says, “Okay, let’s see if that,” and then whatever he says next doesn’t register because a spot on the wall behind Gale warps and twists, and when Blue blinks the ghost is there.

He has no doubt this is what they’re looking for. It looks like a marowak, but… wrong. Not wrong the way surreality would make a ghost look wrong, but like someone sculpted a marowak skeleton out of wax with only a vague idea of what marowak even look like, then melted the result and stretched out its limbs so that it hunches over sharp, narrow legs. Its mask of bone is more of a skull, eye sockets empty voids and teeth leering in a rictus grin.

It looks absolutely terrifying, and for the space of a heartbeat Blue just stares in shock before he points and yells “Bash!” so loud that his voice comes out shrill, barely sounding like his own.

Eevee attacks anyway, but the Shadow Ball misses, splashing harmlessly to the side of the ghost. A bone club suddenly flies to its hand from behind a nearby stack, and it rears the club back, then sends it spinning end over end at Gale.

The ranger heard Blue’s yell, however, and was already turning just in time to duck under the bone. “Shadow!” she commands, and her mismagius sends a much larger sphere of darkness at the ghost—

—”Guys, it’s here!” Blue yells, and unclips a great ball—

—who dodges. Haku’s umbreon is suddenly there, whole body emitting a dark aura that spreads toward the undead marowak… only to miss, the Dark Pulse passing dangerously close to Jason’s lampent. The bone club flies back to the marowak’s grip as it leaps forward, then cracks across the umbreon’s cheek hard enough to twist its neck completely around.

“Bash!” Blue yells even as the umbreon rolls lifelessly across the floor, but the attack misses once again, and Blue realizes—”Our pokemon can’t aim properly, except maybe the ghosts!”

His warning is punctuated by Gale’s mismagius once again sending a Shadow Ball in the right direction. It splashes over the marowak before it can completely avoid the attack, and in return it throws its bone club again, which hits the mismagius dead on, causing it to quite literally explode into scraps of purple cloth and mist.

fuck shit it’s strong

But even through his fear the battle calm is descending, his thoughts moving almost too fast to understand anything but conclusions as he watches Haku summon a haunter and Gale brings out a banette.

wasting attacks, need something widespread

no, precise

He unclips his laser pointer again, and this time when he commands Eevee to “Bash,” her aim is true to the red dot he points onto the enemy ghost’s body… though it’s less of a dot, more of a loose cloud, the high powered laser revealing the insubstantiveness of their opponent.

Jason’s lampent finally gets into position to attack, sending a splash of blue fire at the ghostly marowak at the same time as another Shadow Ball hits it from Haku’s haunter, and as Blue is about to order another attack to follow up the marowak just… melts, disappearing without a trace as the floor twists the same way the wall did when it appeared.

In the silence that follows, Blue can hear the stomp of boots as the others rush to join them. “Did we kill it?” Haku asks, and Blue turns to him just in time to see something drop from the ceiling in the corner of his eye, seemingly far away but in reality just above Gale.

“Gale duck!” Jason yells, but it was too late the moment it appeared, and the ranger drops in a heap as blood sprays from her split skull.

“Need a swap!” Red yells.

“Ready!”

Red’s kingler gets withdrawn, revealing the marowak that had been successfully dodging its claw and hammering it hard enough to leave chips of its shell on the ground. Leaf has time to wonder if a fresh wave are arriving or if it’s one from the initial group that got lost, and then Jean summons a slowbro to take the kingler’s place. The marowak gets one hit on pink, blubbery flesh before it gets blasted back down the stairs in a burst of water.

Unfortunately the new tank is too slow to do more than soak damage. Its attacks help keep the pressure off, but it doesn’t have the reflexes to stop the numerous and nimble cubone trying to run past it.

Overall however, the flow of attackers has slowed as the bodies of the fallen have begun to create a true impediment to those still trying to reach them. Leaf has been wracking her mind for things that might stop this madness, and it’s only upon seeing the partially blocked stairway that at least one idea comes to her.

She quickly withdraws Wise, who’s tiring anyway, and sets Raff to guard while she searches through her bag for the right Container. A dozen quick breaths later she’s opening the box containing the pokedoll she travels with.

“Artem! Can your claydol send this to the stairs?”

He turns to her, eyes wide, then looks at her pokedoll, then the stairs, then back to her and nods. He steps beside Leaf as he gives a few quick commands to help the claydol coordinate exactly what to do, and soon his pokemon is floating overhead and the pokedoll slowly lifts… then launches toward the stairway as Artem holds his arms out in fists, where the foam-covered mannequin knocks a cubone down and adds to the pile of (bodies) obstacles.

Red has his own box out a moment later, and his pokedoll also gets launched into the stairs. They can hear the thuds of bone colliding with foam as the attackers turn on the dolls, for a few moments at least, before deciding they’re dead and trying to climb past them, but then Charmeleon is there, tail whipping globs of smoking pitch into the stairwell, and as the attackers struggle to make their way through the obstacles in darkness, for the first time since the initial marowak showed up there’s space to breathe.

Quite literally: the non-psychics among them are panting, herself included. She can hear the sounds of battle from elsewhere as the rangers at the windows try to keep any ghosts from reaching the floor above, and she realizes she doesn’t actually know how close they are to being overwhelmed: maybe they already have been.

She checks her watch and realizes it’s barely been five minutes since they arrived at this floor.

“Red, we need… to stop this,” Leaf pants. “The way I did… with the abra…” She takes a deep breath. “I know you said you have to keep your shield up, but… can you project for me?”

He turns wide eyes on her, and starts to speak… then closes his mouth, looking uncertain. “I… maybe. I might be able to do both. But it wouldn’t be strong compared to what the ghost is doing.”

“What if you… target the ghost? Would it work as a… a channel? Get it to stop?”

“It’s too dangerous,” Jean says from nearby. “Without your shield—”

“You can shield me,” Red says, face filling with a determination that makes her heart soar. “If you can bear it yourself.”

Jean looks torn, and to Leaf’s surprise Maria steps forward. “Please… they’re just children!”

The psychic looks from her to the cubone bodies, then away, gaze down. “I…”

“We’ve lost two rangers,” Iko suddenly says, making everyone turn to him. He’s watching the battle carefully even as he nurses his froslass back to health. “Maybe more, the others aren’t responding, probably still fighting it. If there’s a chance we can stop it even for a moment, that might be enough.”

Jean looks back and forth between them, then takes a breath and turns to Red. “Alright.”

“We’ll keep you safe,” Maria says, voice as confident as Leaf has ever heard her, and Artem nods.

Red sits down, and Leaf joins him, followed by Jean. “Just like last time,” Red says, giving her a strained smile.

Last time, on the cruise. She smiles back, and closes her eyes, pushing all the grief aside, the pain and uncertainty, the fear.

It doesn’t want to go, at first. She feels it coming back again and again as she tries to focus on the pure, unadulterated love and goodwill she’s practiced a few times since, but always in calmer, more positive surroundings…

Live, she thinks, deciding to lean into the fear rather than try to ignore it. The ghost is sending out grief; let it feel the motherly love she feels for her own pokemon, the desire to protect them no matter what. Live. That’s all that matters. Live, live, live…

“Gale!” Haku yells, and rushes toward her with a potion in hand. Blue tried to lock another attack onto the ghost after it struck, but it didn’t stop when it hit the ground, simply sinking into it again and leaving its bone club behind to clatter across the ground.

He almost steps forward to help with Gale, but instead instinctively flings himself at Jason, catching the older boy around the middle so that they both roll along the ground.

He has no idea if he was right, by the time they stop rolling the ghost might have struck at either of them and disappeared again, but as he helps Jason up he yells, “It can move in the walls and floor and ceiling, keep mobile!”

When the marowak appears again its target is the haunter, and again a single strike of its bone club is all it needs to disperse the ghost’s spikey silhouette into a cloud of poisonous gas.

Ping.

One of the new arrivals throws the ball they’d locked while the haunter was killed, but the ghost is too fast. The next Shadow Ball gets closer to hitting it, but again it’s gone in a blink…

…and by sheer luck, it appears right in front of Blue, who cries out a warning even as his ball pings a lock, and throws with a surge of triumph—

—that dies as the ball goes through it—

—what—

—an attack makes the ghost disappear, and in the coldness of his calm he discards the confusion and starts looking again, taking another ball out as he waits for it to return—

“Blue!”

Again Blue throws himself to the side, shoulder and upper back crashing into a wall as he turns to see the ghost behind where he was, bone club in hand. It raises its club to throw at him, then disappears again as blue fire from Jason’s lampent splashes over where it was standing, sending a wave of heat over Blue as he scrambles to his feet even as it reappears next to him again, and this time when it swings he leaps to the side, feeling pure terror even amid the battle calm as he lands and swivels and backsteps and aims…

It’s gone before the lock, dropping out of the wall by one of the rangers that arrived and bringing the man down with a club, but this time it takes a few hits from the others before disappearing again, throwing its boneclub at another ranger, who dodges in time.

Blue aims the ultra ball in one hand and laser pointer in the other, swiveling his torso as he keeps moving. He has to stay mobile, has to find just the right time… maybe a status effect would be helpful, but he can’t think of any he has that would be quick enough to hit it…

The other rangers have shifted into a star formation, watching each other’s backs as they keep moving as well, and this time when the ghost shows up they’re all ready, dodging its swing and attacking at the same time, and Blue feels a surge of hope. We can get it, we can catch it… The floor under it warps as it starts to disappear, and Blue almost turns away to look for where it will reappear—

But instead of sinking into the ground, it seems to stumble… no, not stumble, stutter, its position moving without its body changing posture, and Jason abruptly yells, “Now, get it now!”

Attacks begin to pour onto it from all directions, Dark Pulses and Shadow Balls, blue Flamethrowers and white Ice Beams (which may be counter productive, but who knows with this thing), and through it all Blue tries to get a lock with his ball, one more try, come on, give me one more chance… but the ping never comes, and when the attacks clear the ghost is gone.

Blue starts swiveling again, and stumbles. The walls, the ceiling, the floor… everything is crowding in on him…

No. It’s static. It’s… normal.

Breathing hard, barely willing to believe it, he carefully takes his goggles off and looks around.

Everything looks fine. The faint feeling of sadness from before is gone.

So are all the bodies.

Here’s a rare author’s post-script! I saw a lot of good guesses as to what this pokemon would be, and I can imagine some might be disappointed that it’s a pokemon that “doesn’t exist.” It’s the only time so far I’ve made up a pokemon, and will probably remain so… but keep in mind that the actual thing we encounter in the games is in some sense exactly this: a marowak ghost pokemon that completely blocks anyone from ascending the tower or detecting it without a Silph Scope, and can’t be captured! Yes it’s treated like a normal marowak in that fight once you have the scope, but that seems like a (boring) artifact of the original games not tweaking pokemon for boss battles, and I’m happy to spice it up to tie it to the wider mysteries in the world I’m building 🙂

Therapy

The Bad Therapist


I often think about what makes a good therapist, and find it a hard question to answer in an organized and concise way. What’s far easier, and maybe as helpful to anyone looking for therapy, is the reverse question. So, in the style of CGP Grey’s 7 Ways to Maximize Misery, I hope this list of what makes for a bad therapist can help you find a good one.

  1. A bad therapist lacks all curiosity.

They assume that their education or experience or inherent wisdom means they just know what the client means and wants and needs, even if (sometimes especially if) the client disagrees. They rarely use reflective listening or Socratic questioning, and rather than reserving assertions for psychoeducation and normalizing, instead tell the client precisely what they think is wrong, what mistakes the client is making, and/or what the client needs to do to improve, all stated with confidence rather than as hypotheses. And if your therapist does all this within the first session? Run away.

  1. A bad therapist will not respond well to negative feedback.

They expect their therapy style and modality to be perfectly suited to any client, and are not willing to adapt or learn how to best help their client. This isn’t to say all therapists and clients are suited to each other, but if reports of dissatisfaction are  turned back on you with accusations of projection or “resistance to treatment,” that’s a great red flag to find another therapist.

  1. A bad therapist pathologizes constantly.

Anything unusual about the client, from their hobbies to their fetishes to their philosophy, is suspected of causing dysfunction regardless of whether it actually does. These therapists conform to the broader culture they’re embedded in, and act as agents of social control on all manner of moral issues, from sexuality to family dynamics to choice of profession. If your therapist speaks in clichés such as “Family always forgives” or “Marriage is a sacred bond,” find a more open minded one.  

  1. A bad therapist shames their client, or makes them ashamed of themselves.

Guilt can be a powerful generator for change, but a therapist’s role is to gently guide the client to better understand themselves, and the sometimes complex relationship between what we value and what we do. If your therapist demonizes your thoughts or feelings or desires rather than helping you better understand them, you’re dealing with another therapist too trapped in their culture or biases to properly facilitate lasting healing and growth.

  1. A bad therapist pushes their worldview onto the client. 

A religious therapist who insists that “God works in mysterious ways,” or an atheist who dismisses spiritual comforts are not only unlikely to help their grieving client of the opposite beliefs, but can cause extra harm by making them feel alienated and unheard. Finding a therapist who matches your worldview can be valuable, but any competent therapist should be able to leave theirs (mostly) at the door.

  1. A bad therapist can’t remain objective. 

Early signs of this may be a therapist who talks too much about themselves or seems overwhelmed by their client’s problems. More subtly, therapists can struggle not to triangulate with a parent or child or spouse against child or parent or spouse. It may even seem like a positive, if for example the therapist starts to seem like a friend who constantly comforts and “takes your side” in everything . To be clear, objective doesn’t mean perfectly balanced; sometimes objectivity requires helping us understand when a mistake is one-sided. But if you don’t feel like your therapist is making an effort to include everyone’s perspectives, find another one. 

  1. A bad therapist will insist that their model is the only one with value.

These therapists view all of mental health through a single lens, the causes and solutions to illness forced into the mold they developed during their education or personal experiences. While an expert in a specific modality can be invaluable, a professional should always be ready to refer a client elsewhere if they encounter a problem in treatment, rather than blame the client and insist they’re not understanding or not trying hard enough. 

  1. A bad therapist is okay with therapy lasting forever.

I may be being too normative here, but I think it’s suboptimal for a therapist to make no effort to set concrete goals or give the client the tools they need to move on without them. This doesn’t mean therapists will know how long a problem “should take,” which we get asked all the time. But after a few sessions, you should have a sense of what it would take for you to feel satisfied ending therapy, or at least reduce the frequency of sessions. If you don’t, it’s worth bringing it up with your therapist to see if the therapist has a sense of direction or goals in mind. Subjective goals and estimates are fine, and many therapists will be wary of overpromising. But ideally there would still be some observable change in the client’s life that they can use as a metric of growth.  It’s also fine to go back to therapy every so often as needed; it’s just the unending years of weekly therapy that, to me, indicates something suboptimal is going on.

  1. A bad therapist can’t properly balance uncertainty and responsibility. 

This is the kind of therapist who attempts to hospitalize their client due to non-critical self-harm, or for simply talking about their suicidality, rather than because there is imminent and specific threat to life. Unfortunately there is little you can do to predict that your therapist is like this ahead of time, but you can at least get a sense for how well they understand the limits of confidentiality when they explain it to you; a good therapist should clarify this distinction so their client feels safe being open about how they feel.

  1. They think therapy is about talking, not doing.

Maybe too normative of me again, but while a large part of therapy is talking, it’s been a century since Freud borrowed the phrase “Talking Cure” and ran with a model of therapy aiming purely for catharsis. I think therapy should be doing more than just venting and processing; it should also involve learning new tools to be practiced between sessions, so that you can reach a point where the therapist is no longer needed. To be clear I’m thinking in terms of suggestions rather than strict “homework,” and some clients may prefer not having even those. But if you feel like therapy isn’t doing much for you and yours hasn’t suggested things for you to do between sessions, start asking for some.

I hope people find this helpful; as I said, it’s not a great guide to help finding a good therapist, but I’ve heard enough horror stories in my professional life by this point to at least try to minimize the amount of bad ones people waste their time, money, and emotional energy with.

I should also clarify that while I hesitate to label anyone a “bad therapists” by some of these more than others, I think each of them does drastically limit the amount of people and situations a therapist can help. For example, therapists who are stuck in a certain cultural zeitgeist can still help clients who conform to that culture’s norms, and therapists who never plan to discharge clients can also still be beneficial to them; hopefully that’s why the client would keep going!

But in my experience at least, each of these represent real failure modes in the therapeutic process that can end up causing more harm than good.

Additionally, it’s worth emphasizing that, independent from how good a therapist is, the most important part of any therapeutic relationship is the individual rapport between client and therapist.  It doesn’t matter what philosophy they have or how they orient to things like how long therapy should be if it doesn’t feel like a good match. If you don’t trust your therapist within the first few sessions, if you don’t feel comfortable talking freely with them, it’s probably better to just find a new one.

As a final note, I deliberately avoided mentioning anything that would count as a violation of therapeutic ethics and professional norms. If your therapist breaks confidentiality, tries to date you, regularly misses sessions, etc, the label “bad therapist” is no longer sufficient; at that point they shouldn’t be a therapist at all, and should be reported to their licensing body.

Pokemon: The Origin of Species

Chapter 88: Heeding Whispers


There’s a beat of silence after Artem’s announcement, followed by Jean saying, “Well, that’s anticlimactic. Back to Celadon, then?”

Red turns to her. “Really?”

“Well, we came to investigate why there were so many of them.”

“He didn’t say they’re back to normal, he said they’re all gone.”

“Mostly,” Artem clarifies.

“Mostly gone, sure.” Red steps forward and hands his trainer ID to the receptionist. “Either way, that seems just as worth investigating!”

“Agreed,” Jason says. “If anything this is even more alarming.”

Blue looks back and forth between them, then nods to Artem. “Fill us in on the way.”

They finish registering at the Trainer House (except for Jason, who says he’ll be staying with his family) then follow Jason out of the Trainer House and toward the tower, which juts up from the middle of the town like a sundial. In a city it would barely qualify as tall, but as the only building over three stories tall in Lavender it practically looms overhead as they walk down the main street toward it.

“The tower became closed to visitors a few hours ago, after they rushed everyone visiting out,” Artem explains, hands stuffed in his jacket pockets against the cold as he walks in the middle of the group so everyone can hear him. “It was really sudden, and they didn’t really explain why, just said it was some unscheduled maintenance. There are extra rangers on patrol around it, but I asked around and none of them seem to be new to town, so the tower seems to be empty. But compared to a few days ago, the graveyard around the tower is basically empty of ghosts, so the extra rangers are basically just walking in circles.”

“Visitors usually don’t encounter many ghosts as long as they stick to the public mausoleum,” Jason says from the front of the group. “If they didn’t close the tower when there were extra around, why would they close it now that there don’t seem to be any?”

“Maybe they’re not actually gone,” Jean asks. “If we assume they closed it for a good reason, that makes more sense, right? Hard to see how a lack of ghosts would be dangerous.”

“All depends what’s causing it,” Leaf says.

“She’s right.” Jason’s voice is tense. “Unless a dark pokemon got in, the biggest threat to ghosts are other ghosts. If one became strong enough to scare off its competition, it might be more dangerous than a large number of weaker pokemon.”

“Scare off,” Maria murmurs. “Or consume.”

As they walk, Red notices the way some people are hurriedly placing strips of paper over their doors and windows. He’s about to bring it up when Blue mutters, “I think the word is out.”

“What are they?” Leaf asks.

“Ofuda.” Red’s katakana is spotty, but he can recognize the five symbols spelling Arceus out on the one hanging above the door of a mixed barbershop and pokemon grooming salon.

“The people who got kicked out must have spread the word,” Artem muses. “Or someone in the rangers talked.”

“Doubt it was the rangers,” Blue says. “They wouldn’t want people panicking like this while they still don’t even know what’s going on. Assuming they still don’t, I guess.”

“I don’t see panic,” Jason says, voice mild but firm. “Just reasonable precaution.”

“Wait, sorry, still not clear on what’s happening,” Leaf says. “Those are, what, protective charms? Against ghost pokemon?”

“Against evil spirits of all kinds,” Jason says. “Though personally I do not believe such things exist. Many spirits may not be beneficial to humans, but ‘evil’ implies a malevolent will, which is much like calling a pokemon or virus evil.”

From their expressions Red can tell that wasn’t the followup sentence the rest of the group expected, but no one seems willing to challenge the idea. Blue glances at Red, as if surprised he’s not saying something in response.

The beat of awkward silence is broken by Leaf, who breaks away from the group and walks up to one of the people moving from building to building. The young woman is wearing the white and red of a shrine priestess, and as Leaf approaches she aims a can with a caterpie on it above the window of the grocery store and presses the nozzle, spraying out a brief stream of sticky thread.

“Excuse me, I was wondering… what you’re doing? Sorry, I’m not from around here.”

The priestess presses the top of the ofuda to the sticky spot, then turns to Leaf, assessing gaze taking in her pokebelt, then jumping to the rest of the group. “Trainers come to the tower?”

“Yes, to research what’s been going on recently. Have you heard something?”

“Only that the spirits have fled. We don’t know where, but…” She separates a handful of the tags and holds them out to her. “Please, be cautious.”

Leaf takes them and nods. “Thank you.” She returns to the group, looking dubiously at the paper… but then her nose wrinkles, and she brings them close to her face for a moment before holding them out far from her body. When she gets closer Jason steps forward, and she turns so he can take one, slipping it under his pokebelt.

“They’ve been soaked in repel,” she explains to the others as she peels one off and follows Jason’s example. “I thought this was… spiritual?”

“You’re like Red,” Jason says, seeming amused. “Thinking the world of spirit and matter are distinct and exclusive. The repel is for pokemon, and the prayer is to strengthen the repel against ghost types.”

“And that works?” Leaf asks, glancing at Red, who already has his pokedex out.

“Inconclusive,” he says after a moment, disappointed. “Come on, how hard can that be to test? I know repel is hard to test in general, and ghosts are fickle, but…”

“But in the meantime, it’s still free repel,” Blue says, and shrugs as he takes the last one and slips it under his own belt.

Soon after they reach the last block before the gates of the massive cemetery surrounding Lavender Tower. “This is where wild ghosts start to regularly get seen,” Jason says, and summons his gastly before taking out his goggles. “Shall we see if these work?”

“What are those?” Artem asks, and Blue explains while the others follow suit. The professor apparently made an even ten, leaving Blue with two spare after he gives Artem one.

Red has to adjust the strap on his three times, during which he hears Leaf say, “Oh, that’s bizarre.” He turns to see her already looking in the gastly’s direction with hers on.

“Yeah, but it’s working… mostly?” Artem adds. “I keep wanting to take it off to see more clearly, which is weird.”

“No, I get it,” Jean insists. “I feel the same, like part of me is convinced the goggles are the problem.”

Curiosity burning, Red finally gets the goggles mostly snug before he opens his eyes and looks around. There’s a slight loss in peripheral vision, and the glass has an odd tinting effect that simultaneously darkens whatever Red sees while sharpening the colors, but overall it’s only a little more restrictive of his vision than safety goggles used to protect against wind, smoke, and powders. He adjusts it once more to try and alleviate the weight of it on the bridge of his nose, then turns and beholds the gastly.

It looks… normal. Or rather, “normal” as he’s been taught to see it on monitors and pokedex screens. It’s not quite like a camera would capture it; the haze around the dark central sphere seems more opaque, which makes it hard to make out the large white eyes that seem to stare into his soul, or the pink tongue that flicks from its mouth.

But Red sees these things, and they don’t make him recoil. No muscles tighten along his spine, no cold sweat pops out of his forehead. Instead a tension in his stomach slowly eases as he realizes that they’re not going to come.

“Cooool…”

The others chuckle, and Red takes a step forward before remembering that he shouldn’t. He starts to walk around the gastly, and instead of its blank white eyes seeming to follow him, he quickly moves beyond its line of sight and gets to observe the others’ indistinct forms through the cloud of its body.

Leaf and Maria begin circling the gastly too, and Red only notices it turning when its eyes come back into sight, following Maria. “Do you think it realizes something’s wrong?” she asks, voice taking on a distant tone that he recognizes as her own intense curiosity. “Maybe it’s not used to people focusing so directly on it. Or so many. Or maybe it feels our lack of unnerve.”

“It’s confused,” Jason confirms. “But not wary or worried. It’s particularly interested in you, Maria. As I suspected, you may have unexplored talent as a medium.”

“Oh.” Her hands rub down the front of her coat, a gesture Red imagines she picked up from Lizzy. “I’m, um. Not sure what to do with that information?”

“Ghost pokemon sense and manipulate emotions the way psychics do thoughts. As a sensitive, your gift, faint though it is, makes your emotions easier for them to detect and respond to, though it will also make you extra susceptible to wild ghosts we might encounter. But if you’ve never tried training ghost types before, you might be surprised by how easy it is.”

“Nice,” Blue says, and smiles at her. “If you can pick one up it would help a lot against Sabrina.”

Jason frowns slightly. “If there are only a few left in the area, catching them may make some natural imbalance worse. As I said before, our main objective—”

“Is to study, sure, but if we’re attacked it’s better to catch them than kill them, right?”

Red starts to suspect, too late, why Blue was so interested in coming, and calls himself ten kinds of fool for not thinking of it right away. He must have been thrilled to hear about all the extra ghost pokemon appearing just before he would be heading to Sabrina’s gym.

“We can be careful,” Leaf says, and looks between Red, Jason and Jean. “You guys can detect them, right?”

“Yes, though it comes with a risk,” Jean says. “Any we sense will sense us back, and might attack. Still, it’s better than being taken by surprise.”

Leaf nods and taps the ofuda in her belt. “Combined with these, we might be able to avoid any fights.”

Blue (reluctantly) nods, and Maria is thoughtfully looking over the gravestone studded hills. Jason joins her, turning a slow half circle to survey the area around the tower as well. “I’d like to do a full search of the graveyard before we attempt to go in. I may be able to learn something from any that have left.”

“Let’s split up, then,” Blue says. “We can let you know if we spot one, while also looking for other clues.”

Red makes a point of turning to Jason. “Does that sound good?”

The medium sends Red a pulse of gratitude, then considers this a moment before nodding. “I’ll be safe travelling alone. For the rest…” He looks at Blue. “What would you recommend?”

Blue hooks his thumbs in his pockets. “Well, Jean and I are the strongest trainers here, so I could go with Red and Leaf while she leads Maria and Artem… but to be honest, however good you are with ghost pokemon, this is an unusual situation. I don’t think anyone should be traveling alone.”

“I’m confident that I can avoid a battle with a wild if I encounter one, but I can’t assure the same for anyone with me.”

“Should we expect observable clues?” Artem asks. “If not, the rest of us are basically just here for muscle, and to help figure out what’s happening once we start learning something. Seems silly not to make use of us at every stage.”

It’s a fair point. Red turns to Jason and shrugs. “At least take Maria with you? You can teach her more about her gift, in case it’s something she wants to pursue.”

Jason’s expression becomes thoughtful again (or at least, Red thinks it does, he’s hard to read even without the goggles), and when he turns to her Maria is already nodding. “I’d be happy to learn, if it’s not an imposition.”

“Not at all.”

“Alright, then,” Blue says, hand tracing the dive ball at the front right position on his waist. “Artem, sorry, I assumed without asking that Jean and I are the most experienced trainers here. What’s on your belt?”

“Oh, that’s fine, yeah, I only have two badges. Right now I’m carrying nosepass, trubbish, magnemite, claydol, and electrode.”

Blue blinks. “You use an electrode? In battle?”

Red can’t tell if Blue is worried or impressed (maybe both), but his own attention is elsewhere. “You only use manmade pokemon?”

“It overlaps with my research,” Artem says to Red, then turns to Blue. “I spent a few months at Vermilion Gym last year.”

“Alright, well I’m still going to pair you with Jean, since she’s our strongest. You two head right, Jason and Maria go straight, and Leaf, Red and I will go left. We’ll meet at the far side if nothing is found, then make our way back to the tower entrance. Any questions?”

No one appears to have any, and Blue looks to Jason last. The medium nods, and Blue unclips the white and blue diveball. “Go, Maturin!”

“Woah. She’s gotten big.” Standing on its hindlegs brings the wartortle’s fanlike ears past Blue’s head, and her body is as wide as his. When Red brings out Charmeleon his horn only comes up to Maturin’s neck, and when Leaf summons Raff, he feels a note of chagrin to see that even the ivysaur is bigger than Charmeleon now. Clearly he needs to spend more time with his starter.

Once the others summon their own pokemon and Blue coordinates their radio frequencies, the three groups set off, and Red starts to pulse out his psydar. He quickly filters the minds of Leaf and their three pokemon out from his attention, then focuses on any new ones that appear at the edges of his “bubble.”

Before long he senses a pokemon underground, probably a cubone looking for a meal among the dead. The scavenger goes still as their footsteps approach, then quickly flees beyond his range, and soon after they pass within range of an old couple visiting a gravestone, followed by a small funeral gathering, everyone’s minds touched with fresh grief. It’s a relatively new emotion for Red to sense through simple observation rather than merger; the only time he felt it in the past was after the storm.

Occasionally he also senses the cautious, tense, or alert minds of rangers, always in pairs as they walk patrols around the tower.

About a quarter of an hour passes without any sense of the alien minds he glimpsed when meeting Jason’s ghost pokemon… but instead of relaxing into a less vigilant state, his body remains tense, and he realizes how nervous he is about mentally contacting a ghost again.

Don’t stress about it. The others can protect us if you’re disoriented, and Jason is nearby.

Hmm. Usually unpartitioned Red isn’t the optimistic one… if he feels safe because of the partition, he definitely shouldn’t given that their Spinarak’s ghost attack weakened his partition for weeks.

Yes, I know. If we get hit by one now, we’re in danger of losing all this progress for a while…

Red’s stomach feels queasy, and he almost thinks it’s just from the idea of losing “himself” for a while if the partition stays down. But there’s something else, too, some other fear that feels hard to define, and he wishes he could stop using his psydar for a moment to try Focusing on it…

No. The rejection is strong enough to make Red stumble a step, and he quickly understands why: whatever he’d been about to poke at was hidden for a reason.

“What’s up?” Blue asks, suddenly tense. “Found something?”

“No, just, uh, tripped.” His curiosity burns to find out what he’s forgetting, what secret might be revealed if his partition goes down… but no, that would defeat the purpose. Whatever it is, his unpartitioned self is worried about being revealed, all he has to know is that it would be bad. Red forces himself to focus on his psydar again. “Still all quiet around us.” He realizes with surprise that they’ve walked halfway around the tower.

“I know we’re here for a reason, but it’s hard not to hope it stays that way,” Leaf says as she tosses a treat toward Raff. The ivysaur catches it out of the air with a vine, and she throws another at Maturin, then Charmeleon, who dashes after it once Red mentally nudges him to let him know it’s okay to eat. “This is really nice.”

“Less creepy than hunting ghosts in a graveyard should be,” Blue agrees.

“Could always come back at night,” Leaf says with a grin. “Particularly without Red to warn us if something is coming. But I meant just… the surroundings, I guess. It’s oddly peaceful. And it’s nice traveling with you two again, no offense to the others.” She nudges Blue with her elbow. “You group us three together on purpose?”

“Nah, this split made the most sense. It does let me ask, though…” He turns to Red. “Was I being overbearing?”

“A little,” he says, relieved he didn’t have to bring it up himself, and that Blue sounds curious rather than upset. “I know you’ve got the most experience doing things like this, and Jason does too. But, well, he is the one that set things off, and the expert on ghosts…”

“I get it. Been treating him like a quest giver.” Blue sighs, breath pluming out in front of him. “Still feels like a waste not to catch whatever pokemon we can find, especially if they’re suddenly becoming rare, and I know Sabrina is going to have a couple Psychic/Fighting types waiting for me. Isn’t there some way you could attract them to us, Red?”

“I thought about it,” he admits. “I don’t think any ghosts hunt by sound, though, or by smell. They like to feed on psychics or other ghosts, so Jean or Jason or I would have to just project out something that would make us seem vulnerable enough that any ghosts in the area come to feed.”

“Which would maybe get you eaten by a hungry horde.” Blue sighs. “Guess I’ll just buy a couple ghosts if we don’t find any.”

“Getting rid of another self-imposed rule?”

“Maybe, yeah. They feel more arbitrary after everything that’s happened, particularly my battle with Erika. And I did buy Rive for Surge, so it’s not unprecedented. Just wanted to keep my main fighters those I caught myself, if I could.”

They walk silently after that, and Red starts to pay more attention to their surroundings. After a minute he decides Leaf is right. There’s something calming about the rows of white and grey stone on green hills beneath the grey winter sky. The faint smells of grass and stone and soil come to him with every cold breath, and the air is still and quiet, almost like the world itself is holding its breath in respect of the dead.

He’s glad the partition is up, or he’d have a much harder time appreciating all this.

Just as he has that thought, he notices a speck of something falling slowly across his field of vision. He looks up, then to the sides, and stops to take off his goggles, blinking at the brighter world he finds himself in. He rubs the bridge of his nose where the weight of the goggles was resting, then grins as he realizes that what he’s seeing is the first snowfall of winter descending around them.

“Ooo!” Leaf sticks her tongue out and tries to catch a falling flake, and Red watches for long enough that Blue nudges him with his elbow. Red flushes and starts his psydar pulses again as he raises his collar and tugs his hat down.

“About time.” Blue opens a container ball from his bag and takes out a scarf. “Thought all that shit in Hoenn meant we weren’t getting a proper winter this year.”

“Glad we did. It’s been years since I saw snow.” Leaf ties her hair up, then pulls a wool hat out of her bag while Raff makes a plaintive sound and rubs at his nose. “Relax you big baby, it’s a snowflake, not an Ice Beam.” Still, she withdraws him, and Red replaces Charmeleon with Pikachu while Blue swaps Maturin for Aiko’s eevee.

She’s grown as well, as tall as Blue’s waist. Her black nose lifts to sniff the cold air, then she bounds toward Leaf to nuzzle her legs. “You’re really using a Normal type to hunt ghosts?” Leaf asks as she bends down to vigorously rub her fingers through its silver fur with a grin. “Or are you trying to get her to evolve into glaceon?”

“Wouldn’t mind a glaceon,” Blue admits. “But no, this pretty lady is, in fact, a ghost hunting machine. I bought a Shadow Ball TM so she and Snorlax have coverage. It’s not too strong from either of them, but combined with their defensive advantage I’m pretty confident in her ability to handle most things we might encounter.”

Red nods speculatively. The research is still spotty, but does seem to point to the Normal pokemon not being consistently “interesting” to ghosts, such that they’ll often ignore them in the wild. It’s often cited as the only attribute the Normal type can be said to directly possess, though it seems like backwards reasoning to Red. If the label gets put on any pokemon that would not otherwise be called Normal but shares the same attribute, then they’ve just come up with a “type” to explain a single trait that many, varied other pokemon share.

Still, it can’t be denied that it’s an advantage if paired with an attack that the ghost is susceptible to. “Good thinking. I actually bought Shadow Claw before I set—” His head yanks up.

The other two immediately turn to follow his gaze, but he knows they don’t see them, since Red can’t see them either, even with his goggles off; the grey sky is nearly hidden by growing flurries of falling snow. But he can still sense them, just on the edge of his awareness…

“Red?”

“It’s okay,” he says, and closes his eyes so he can better focus on what he’s sensing. “They’re not… I think they’re unown.” There’s five of them moving through the air in a loose ribbon. Red brushes some melted snowflakes from his eyelids, then puts his goggles back on and opens them before looking up again. He thinks he can vaguely make them out, though they keep disappearing for a while when he blinks. “They’re just flying around above us.” He’d love to catch one and try merging with it; he read online that their minds are absurdly simple, even more so than exeggcute, but it still seems like it would be a new and interesting experience.

“Better get some air support then,” Leaf says, and summons Wise, the noctowl she caught during the Vermilion storm.

“The groups seen flying around lately haven’t been reported as attacking anyone yet, as far as I’ve heard?”

“I know, but better safe than sorry, right? Plus, Wise can also protect us from any ghosts that show up from above.”

“It makes Pikachu the prime target,” Blue admits. “But also makes the ghosts more predictable. Don’t worry, we’ll keep him safe.”

Red nods, letting his worry for his pokemon go by leaning into his trust in his friends, and they set off again as Wise soars above them in a protective, near-silent circle. The crunch of their footsteps grows louder as they go from walking on grass to compacting fresh snow beneath each step, and soon snow covers the grass around them entirely, the whole graveyard transformed into something even more stark and colorless… but still beautiful in its own way.

They watch Pikachu and Eevee frolic through the snow and catch up on some of the minutiae of their recent day-to-day lives. Red gets a text from his mother expressing excitement about him being in town and asking him if he’s wearing enough layers, and Leaf sends a message to Mr. Sakai to see if he needs help due to the snow.

They’re three fourths of the way around the tower when Jean suddenly speaks into their earpieces. “Got one, about 25 degrees from the tower. It noticed me, but it’s keeping its distance. We are too.”

The three of them are already running when Blue says, “On our way,” back, which is quickly echoed by Jason.

The snow is coming down hard enough to limit visibility beyond the tower, but once they reach the top of the hill where it sits they quickly spot the others and start down towards them.

There’s two more figures than they expected with the others, however: a man and woman pair of rangers. The man is in discussion with Jean, while the woman examines one of their goggles. As they get closer Red sees that Jason isn’t wearing his; instead the medium is standing with his eyes closed, fingers turning his beads as snow collects on the handmade wool cap covering his head and ears. It looks decidedly out of place with his robes.

“…for our investigation,” Jean is saying as they get close enough to overhear. The cold air cuts Red’s lungs like knives with each breath, and he struggles to draw his next one in quieter. “We were tipped off that something unusual was happening.”

“Tipped off by whom, exactly—” The young ranger pauses, having just noticed the three of them. He’s maybe Daisy’s age, but a square jaw and crew cut make him look older. “Shit, it’s the Oaklings themselves.” Leaf discreetly elbows Red, who bites his tongue. “These five with you, Young Oak?”

Oh boy. But Blue doesn’t puff out his chest, simply nodding as he bends down to feed his panting Eevee a treat. “Is there a problem here?”

“No, I just… didn’t expect the Professor to send you kids, that’s all.” His partner, a tall woman with cornrows that end in various colorful beads, has stopped examining the goggles for a moment to also look between the three of them in surprise. Her name tag says Gale on it, and his Nathan.

“Send us? I mean, he knows we’re here, but it was our idea to come.” Blue is frowning slightly. “We made a public post about our intent to investigate the tower a few days ago?”

“A few days… Oh, because of all the ghosts that were showing up. But if the Professor didn’t send you today…” Nathan glances at his partner, but Gale is focusing on the goggles again. After adjusting the strap to fit her, she summons a mismagius. Red instinctively looks away, then remembers he’s wearing the goggles and turns curiously back. It looks like a floating puppet, some elaborately designed piece of purple and violet cloth with three red gems embroidered on the front, and painted-on yellow and crimson eyes.

“Huh,” she says as she withdraws her pokemon and takes the goggles off. “It really works.”

“Shit, how come we don’t have this stuff?” Nathan shakes his head and turns back to Blue. “Would your grandfather be willing to make a couple dozen of these for those of us stationed here?”

“Uh, maybe. I can call him…?”

“Please do. We’re happy to pay, assuming they don’t cost a fortune. In the meantime, we may have to appropriate this gear for our own investigation.”

There’s a moment of silence, and then a lot of people start speaking at once.

“Wait, but you—”

“—we’re here to—”

“—that mean you found—”

“—can help if we—”

“—guys, chill, chill!” Blue says, hands up to either side, and the rest of the group trails off. Blue nods to them (ignoring Leaf’s grin) then looks at Jason, who’s still standing silently with his eyes closed. “Everything okay, Jason?”

“Yes,” the medium replies, voice flat and distant in a way that Red recognizes from their merging practice. He realizes Jason is sweating, despite the cold, and feels guilty for not noticing before Blue did. A quick pulse of his psydar confirms that Jason is attempting to merge with a nearby gastly… and also reveals that both rangers are dark.

“Wait, what’s wrong?” Gale’s alarm turns her voice sharp, one hand dropping to her belt. “Are you being attacked?”

“Not… quite… from your perspective… perhaps… carry on, please…”

“Don’t worry,” Blue says to the rangers. “He knows what he’s doing. That’s what I meant to tell you… we would, of course, be happy to assist by lending you our equipment if needed, but I believe we could be valuable resources ourselves.”

Gale is frowning as she looks between them, still clearly concerned for Jason. “We’re still trying to determine what’s happening here, exactly. We don’t want to involve non-rangers until we know what we’re stepping into, and if the Professor didn’t send you… plus, three of you are psychics, which puts you at higher risk.”

“Not just any psychics,” Red puts in. If he’s going to learn to flex his status, might as well start now. “Jason and I are Sabrina’s students, and he’s an expert on Ghost type pokemon.” He hopes Jason doesn’t pick this moment to contest that label. “And Jean is from Celadon Gym.”

“That I guessed,” the ranger says, voice wry. “And the rest of you? Are you Ghost experts too?”

“Trainer and researcher,” Artem says, raising his hand.

“Trainer and journalist?” Leaf tries, raising her own. “Also, I might have special love-powers that help calm psychics and might work on ghosts?”

Both rangers, Artem, and Jean all stare at Leaf while Maria raises her hand. “I’m not really sure why I’m here, other than curiosity and a desire to be helpful. Oh, trainer. But also Jason says I might be a non-psychic medium, which I didn’t know existed, so I’d like to stay and learn more about that if I’m allowed?”

“Love-powers,” a bemused Jean repeats as Blue murmurs something to Maria.

“Of course, the thing with the abra.” Artem looks excited. “You think that might keep you safe from ghosts? Or is there some other experiment you’ve run that hasn’t been publicized?”

Leaf shrugs and tosses a treat up for Wise, who snaps it out of the air. “It seems to calm other psychics that I’m around, though I’ve only tested it on tame ones, and know they aren’t naturally scared of humans, so maybe it won’t be as reassuring, but—”

“Look, it’s not just about the ghosts,” Nathan interrupts. “We’re not at liberty to discuss everything, but there have also been a suspicious amount of people moving around the tower over the past few weeks.”

“Wait, what?” Blue is frowning at the rangers. “Why hasn’t that been mentioned anywhere?”

“Suspicious in retrospect,” Gale amends, shooting her partner a look. “We had no reason to suspect anything before, but they seem to have stopped showing up today, which may be related to nearly all the ghosts having vanished. We’ve reported it, of course, but there’s nothing to justify a general bulletin.”

“So you thought the Professor sent us because he was told about what’s going on,” Blue smiles. “When really, we were already on our way. I bet Grandpa won’t even read your message until sometime tonight.”

“What do you plan to do with the goggles, anyway?” Red asks. “If the ghosts are mostly gone, and the mysterious people aren’t showing up…”

The rangers share a look this time, and Gale sighs. “Alright, this is above our paygrade. Better let the sergeant know and see what he says.”

Nathan nods and steps away, presumably to make a call, while Blue gives Gale a charming smile. “So what can you tell us?”

Red lets Blue handle that, walking over to Jason with Pikachu trailing him in the snow and settling between his feet. Red drops some berries for him as he studies the medium, who’s still standing with his eyes closed, face pale but for twin red spots on his cheeks. His fingers are clutching his necklace beads rather than turning them, and Red feels worry spread through his gut.

“Hey,” Red murmurs. “Anything I can do?”

“Nh,” Jason grunts back, and swallows. “No… just need… time…”

Jean joins them, and Red turns to her. “Were the rangers here when you found it?”

“No, they saw Jason and Maria running to us and came to see what was wrong.” She’s still watching Jason, brow creased. “Amazing that he can continue to do this while being attacked.”

“While… what?” Red looks back at Jason in horror. “He said he wasn’t…” Wait, shit, it’s the usual thing he does of framing things in his own way. Red remembers being hit by the spinarak attack again, and winces as he imagines being constantly hit by something even stronger… “How is he doing it?”

“I don’t know. Some very specialized and skillful use of amnesia, perhaps, or a unique mental shield… or something in his state of mind that makes the attacks less harmful than they would otherwise be…”

Red considers it a mark of personal growth that he doesn’t immediately decide to try mirroring Jason’s mental state. Of course, that could just be his unpartitioned self sending him some restraint…

Not really. Kind of hard to stay interested in anything at the moment.

Red understands; he never did visit Dad’s grave, and being around other rangers is sometimes triggering. He’s glad the partition is there to keep him able to focus on the puzzle in front of him, but knows he should probably talk to Dr. Seward about how he can build up to visiting the Pallet graveyard.

For now, he needs to focus on the puzzle in front of him. It’s easy to think of the reasons to merge with Jason right now: they may be about to enter the tower, in which he may get attacked by a ghost, and there’s no other opportunity to try mirroring a live attack since Jason can’t exactly order his own pokemon to attack him, and Red doubts anyone else with one would unless Red sets up another research study.

For reasons not to do it now… well those are obvious too. It might go badly and mess things up for Jason, or mess up Blue’s plan to get them all involved in investigating whatever is happening. Also it might be really painful and unpleasant to have his partition get ruined for a while if something goes wrong, and that itself might cause bad stuff he can’t even think of.

Meaning there are some known unknowns, which Red should probably work to shift to knowns before he tries it—

Ask Jason. We don’t know what we might face in the tower, and we need to be prepared. It’s not pessimistic, I’m being appropriately cautious by planning for things going wrong. Things always go wrong, do you want to lose another friend? No, morbid would be—

“Red?” Jean is looking at him with concern. “Are you alright?”

“Yeah, fine. Why?”

“You were muttering to yourself.”

Well that’s awkward. Better keep an eye out for that. “I was just thinking, I might be able to learn to do it if I could join the merger for a moment. I’ll only do it if Jason says it’s okay, though.”

“Do it,” Jason says, almost before Red finishes talking. It takes him by surprise, and he almost asks if the medium is sure before realizing that now probably isn’t the time to pester him with questions. Trust him to know what you can handle.

He does, when it comes to Ghost pokemon. But first he summons a container box to sit on. Pikachu jumps into his lap and curls into a warm, fuzzy ball, and Red uses the mouse’s rapid heartbeats against his thigh to ground himself before extending his senses.

The merger is difficult to focus on at first. While he expected a fierce strain of mind against mind, oddly enough the impression he gets is… calling it a dance would be aggrandizing it. It’s nothing so coordinated. Instead the ghost is keeping its distance, while Jason keeps trying to gently merge with it, only to be driven away by an attack for a few moments before trying again. Or maybe “attack” really is the wrong word… in terms of effort from the gastly, they seem like the equivalent of a meowth batting at a hand trying to pet it at the wrong moment.

Most pokemon would probably get more irritated and lash out, but he remembers Jason saying that ghost pokemon experience time, space, and the order of events in very different ways, and this is the first time he’s seeing it in action. The gastly seems locked in a loop of indifference, as if everything happening is happening for the first time. In return, the medium is only trying to share one sense at a time, and waiting patiently for more even as he’s hit by something that he quickly shuts down. Sometimes it’s a memory that gets amnesia’d, or an emotion that he partitions, but whatever the effect, he’s ready to abandon that part of himself and (humbly) try again.

Humility. It’s hard to think of how it wasn’t the first thing he noticed, the medium is radiating it, his entire being focused on a sense of unassuming deference to the ghost’s preferences and desires. Even his goal to merge is somehow expressed through humility, and once Red taps into it the analogy that immediately comes to mind is his own attitude at Pallet Lab when he had the opportunity to help one of the researchers on some project, no matter how minor his role would be.

Let me help, Jason sends without words, only to be hit by something that feels like intense disgust, evoking memories of a time Red stepped in poop barefoot as a child and started crying with the intensity of how unclean he felt, wanting to crawl out of his own skin…

Partition, reorient, extend… Let me learn…

Agony, sharp and debilitating, lying with a broken arm that sent pain lancing through him as he struggled to stay still on the forest floor…

Abruptly forgotten, to Jason if not to Red. Let me share…

Each repetition lets Red lock down another aspect of Jason’s mental state, until little by little a shape emerges, a mental mold to adjust his own thoughts to… except he can’t.

Or maybe he can… it takes effort, holding a rubber band tense instead of flipping a switch. The mold is harder to inhabit than any other he adopted, because his own thoughts, his axiomatic beliefs and perspectives, feel spiky, more firmly bolted down, unwilling or unable to fit.

He tries, a bit desperately, to ask his unpartitioned self for help, and is surprised when he gets a response.

You can do this. There’s nothing another brain can think that we can’t, and there’s always some value to being able to hold another perspective. I’ll keep us safe.

Red nods to himself, and tries again. First he revisits one axiom, then the other, then the worldview itself, then the minute to minute attitude… little by little, he feels like he can inhabit his own alternative, a mental state that feels like… like…

…like boggling-prostrate-before-the-universe. A feeling that he’s truly free, that he can understand the world’s infinite vastness, and simultaneously that he can’t, that no one can, and that’s how it would always be, and that’s okay…

Woah. That feels… wobbly. No thanks.

The mental state abruptly ends, and there’s a feeling of solidity that returns to his mind. Only now can he look back on how it was for those few moments and realize how open he was to anything that might come.

A chill goes down Red’s back that has nothing to do with the cold. That level of humility, where anything seemed possible, now feels dangerously like what he worried about before. It’s a frame of mind that lets anything in, without preconceived notions or biases… but also without any guardrails or filters. And he has no idea what might come in to stay, if he’s not careful.

But his unpartitioned self didn’t seem affected by it…

No, not at all, which from his side feels like an extra plus we learned.

Huh. Red never tried mirroring a mental state while the partition was up, but it’s good to know it works like that. He’ll have to make sure never to use that particular one while the partition is down.

Red feels it when the gastly finally lets Jason in, and quickly withdraws his own senses so as not to scare it off. When he opens his eyes the group is watching him and Jason, who’s sitting on the container box beside him. Jean has a distant look in her eyes, which clears when she meets his.

“I was worried he might get tired,” she says, and he realizes she must have led Jason to the box. “Something’s changed?”

“Yeah.” Red looks at the others again, who seem to be expecting him to say something, but when he tries to speak he finds his throat is dry, and has to drink some water first. That’s when he notices the cold sweat on his face and looks back at Jason, concerned. How the medium is able to deal with that, so much more directly and for so much longer… it’s hard to imagine that he learned to do it on his own, years ago and with only basic psychic training. He was Red’s age at the time, but even with everything Red has learned from his various teachers and tutors, not to mention Jason himself, he’s not sure he ever would have figured that out. It’s too fundamentally a different way to view the world. “He’s okay,” Red adds after a moment for extra reassurance.

“Did he learn anything?” Gale asks as she approaches, still holding Jason’s goggles.

“Uh, not yet, but I think he might now? That was all just… preparation.”

“Damn.” She sounds more impressed than disappointed. “Well, Sarge says he wants to meet you all, so we’ll head up to the tower as soon as—”

Jason takes a deep breath, eyes opening, but unfocused. He abruptly sags to the side, and Red extends an arm to brace around his shoulders, then holds up his water bottle.

The medium gives him a grateful look as he drinks, then one to Jean, who gently wipes his forehead with some cloth pulled from some hidden pocket of her kimono. When he lowers the water bottle and clears his throat, Jason looks at the gathered trainers and says, “Fear.”

The group is silent a moment. “Fear…?” Blue finally prompts.

“That’s what it felt, when it left the tower. When it left its home. That’s what it felt from the others, before they disappeared… that, and grief.”

Silence returns. No one suggests that this is very little information to have gained given what Jason went through to learn it.

Red looks up at the tower, and feels another chill skitter up his spine. Fear, and grief.

The tower entrance does indeed have a sign regretfully informing visitors of temporary maintenance, but Gale and Nathan lead the group straight in and past the entrance lobby. Red can tell by the others’ reactions that he’s not the only one here for the first time, and not the only one impressed.

“Pictures don’t really do it justice,” Leaf murmurs, and Red nods agreement as their feet echo on the clean marble. The combination of white floors, walls, and ceiling makes Red feel like he’s walking into a church. Which, he supposes, isn’t far off. Even lacking religious iconography the mausoleum has the sacred feel of a spiritual place, one that doesn’t make anyone feel excluded.

Normally he knows the halls would be filled with people come to visit the interred dead; he remembers enough history to know that it was built to house the remains of those people and pokemon lost in defense of the town during a Moltres attack decades ago. That was only part of its purpose, however, and arguably its least important one. Built entirely of stone and without windows in order to resist the might of subsequent Stormbringers, it’s the town’s primary shelter when calamity approaches, able to house its entire population when it was built.

The town has grown since then, and Red figures the pokemon center and trainer house and others help shelter any overflow for emergencies, but the extra burial space the tower started with has been subsequently given over the years to anyone else who died in attacks on the town. As Red follows the group down into the first basement level, he wonders what they’ll do when they run out of space.

The sergeant’s office looks more like a repurposed storage room, which makes it a bit crowded once they’re all inside. The man behind the desk is one of the oldest rangers Red’s ever seen; completely bald, with spotted skin, bushy eyebrows, and a thin white goatee that trails to his chest. His eyes are intense, however, and like most rangers Red’s met (like Dad) he doesn’t stand on ceremony, simply waving them all in and resting his chin on his hands before asking, “How did you all find out about what was going on here?” in a voice roughened with age.

Red gets the impression that half the group (himself included) looks at Jason while the other half looks at Artem, because when he glances back the sergeant’s piercing gaze is looking between them expectantly.

“I grew up here,” Jason starts. “My old teacher told me about the gradual abundance of ghosts. That’s what we came to investigate.”

“I came in response to the public post to investigate,” Artem says, then clears his throat. “As for the rest, I kind of just guessed? It’s not too hard, once you’ve seen enough rangers covering something up.”

Now everyone is staring at Artem, except for Blue, who smirks. The researcher does an admirable job of not wilting from the concentrated attention, until Sergeant Iko nods. “Well, I won’t turn away competent help, and Gale and Nathan say you have some skills that might be particularly useful. The question is how much value those skills bring compared to your goggles on one of my own people.”

Maria steps forward. “I’d like to volunteer my goggles.”

“I would also like to offer my goggles,” Jason says, cutting off what Red predicts would be an objection from Blue. “I don’t believe I need them to be helpful.”

Red knows he should probably offer his too, he’s not even the best trainer in the room let alone among the rangers…

“Hold on, guys.” Blue crosses his arms, staring levelly at the sergeant. “I’m happy to call Gramps and see how quickly we can get more goggles to your people, but first it would be nice to know what you need them for. There’s been no reported incident here to warrant immediate appropriation, so what’s the secret danger that you don’t want the public to know about? Artem is right, I’ve been in a situation like this before, down to the ofuda being plastered all over town because the civilians were afraid of things the rangers weren’t telling them. Unless your people are all very good at not gossiping, which I’m guessing you’re not sure of by the way you asked how we know what’s happening, this secret feels like it’s only got a couple days of life to it, max.”

Sergeant Iko meets his gaze for a few tense heartbeats, and Red imagines the rest of the group is also holding its breath to see how such a bold challenge will be taken.

Then the ranger smiles ruefully and runs a hand over his smooth head. “You have to understand, this is supposed to be the safe retreat for the town. We’ve done our best to ensure people can feel safe with ghosts randomly wandering in their midst. Luckily, though they give people a fright sometimes, they’ve only rarely gone really hostile… Until about four hours ago, when some unidentified phenomenon cleared out the top floor. Oak, Tanaka, Birch, Ikeda, Abe, Morty, Harrow, Agatha, everyone who might be interested in this has been told, but it doesn’t appear to be directly dangerous, so right now it’s mostly an intellectual curiosity. But given the previous build up of ghosts and their sudden disappearance, it’s hard not to be worried—”

“What’s the phenomenon?” Red interrupts, unable to help himself from getting excited.

“Fear,” Jason guesses, voice distant. “And grief.”

The sergeant doesn’t even look surprised that he knows. “Along with visual distortions, possibly hallucinations. In my case, it was like the walls were closing in; I couldn’t stay for more than twenty seconds before feeling like I was going to collapse into a heap and cry like a baby.” He speaks with the flat, simple tone of someone relaying what he ate for lunch. “It feels like surreality, but not focused on a particular pokemon, or not one that we’ve been able to catch sight of yet. It’s possible the goggles do nothing, but I’d like to find out as soon as we can what’s causing this.”

Even this news doesn’t keep Red from dancing his weight from foot to foot, and he sees the same excitement in Artem’s face. They share a look, and a nod that Red doesn’t even understand. What did he just instinctively agree to? Collaborating on a paper? Or maybe it was just an acknowledgement of mutual excitement—

Leaf subtly elbows Red again, and he realizes that he should probably not look too excited. Everyone else seems pretty grim, but come on, it’s not like anyone’s died.

Yet.

“And the suspicious people?” Blue asks.

Iko looks from Blue to Gale and Nathan, and Red doesn’t need his powers to sense their chagrin. “Still looking into it, but so far we’ve got nothing. Cameras are hard to keep in good order inside the tower, the ghosts seem to like breaking them, but I’ve got a man looking through footage around it for the past two weeks and so far no one’s been caught doing anything suspicious.”

Blue rubs his face. “Just to check… you guys would have noticed if an absol ran upstairs somehow?”

Red remembers his story about the caves. “You think this is Pressure? I guess it does sound more like it than surreality…” He turns to Jason, who looks troubled, but nods.

“Or maybe some ghost has it, but a strong Dark pokemon would probably kill or scare everything away, right?”

“I’m not going to say ‘impossible,'” Gale says, “Because clearly something unusual is happening. But I think someone would have noticed if a dark pokemon was running around in here…” She grows thoughtful. “Unless…”

“Unless a renegade summoned it on the top floor,” Leaf says, voice grim.

“Or it flew or climbed through a hole in the roof?” Red looks around. “Has anyone flown overhead to check?”

The room is quiet a moment, and then Sergeant Iko turns subtly to Nathan, who nods before stepping outside.

“Be careful,” Blue calls after him. “It might actually be on the roof!”

“I’d like to request permission to check the top floor with your rangers,” Jason asks the sergeant. “At the very least I’d like to go to the second or third floor and see what I can sense from there.”

“I’d like to go with him,” Red says, and Jean adds, “As would I.”

“Me too.” Artem shrugs. “Not a psychic, but there’s not much else I’m here for.”

“I suppose I can join, just to listen in,” Maria says, and Blue smiles at her before turning back to Iko.

“Assuming that’s okay with you, I’ll step outside to call my grandpa and make sure he got your message.” Blue unclips a container ball. “Meanwhile, there are three spare goggles for your people to wear in here, and the rest of us can lend you ours if you want to try another check of the top floor.”

The sergeant taps his fingers on the desk, then looks at Gale. “Call everyone in. If something goes wrong, I want to make sure we’re ready to handle it.” She nods, and he turns to Blue. “Go ahead. If he can make more goggles for us I’d appreciate it, and if he can’t come himself—”

“A new phenomenon like this, possibly a new pokemon?” Red grins. “He’ll be here.”

“—well, then I want to be able to provide him with as much info as we can. Gale, tell Aimi to watch the door.”

“Yes, Sir.”

She leaves, and Iko gets to his feet, scanning the group once more before saying, “Welcome aboard.”

They go upstairs, and Red uses the downtime to visit the washroom, feeling nervous flutters in his stomach at the idea of what might be waiting for them at the top of the tower. Little by little the excitement gets dwarfed by something else: the memory of the casino, of being trapped in rubble, in pain while people died and fought around him…

He takes a deep breath, tries to ground himself in his body. Simple sensations, like the feel of his shirt and jacket and hat, the press of the ground against his shoes. What’s the worst case? Renegades with some pokemon that can use pressure, but with a small army of rangers, we’ll probably be fine.

There might be casualties. And even that’s not really the worst case, there are many others, like some new pokemon with abilities we can’t imagine, or even a new legendary, freshly born and ready to wipe out the town if bothered…

“Get a grip,” he mutters, staring at himself in the mirror. He’s overcome fear before, he can do it again…

Except for that one time…

Red shakes his head, growing angry at his unpartitioned self now. They’ve had months to look into how justified that decision was, and so far they haven’t because unpartitioned Red is still having trouble bringing himself to do so, but they made an agreement (back before they were simultaneously around and he was Sad Red or whatever) not to think that way until they do.

“I don’t know what’s gotten into you,” he says to his reflection. “But you treat being the unpartitioned one as if it automatically makes you the undisputed leader. There’s not much I can do about that, but if you’re going to act like the leader, start really acting like one rather than switching between bossy and pessimistic.”

Silence from his unpartitioned self. Which is just great, as if he needed to feel more awkward about talking to himself…

Sorry.

Red blinks, then nods, washing his hands one more time just to give himself time to think before he heads outside. They know what to do. Premortem, plan for failure modes, ready contingencies.

Right. And avoid direct contact with ghosts.

But… the new mental state… new species!

We don’t know it’s a new species, and we don’t know how well the new state will work for us yet. Play it safe, let someone else catch it if it exists, study it later.

Red can’t argue with that, it’s not like he’s going to be storming the top floor himself. He sighs, acknowledges the point, then leaves the washroom to rejoin the others. By the time he finds them the lobby of the tower has rows of rangers standing at attention as Sergeant Iko relays the plan. Nathan is back, still wearing his riding gear, and Blue standing by the others. He grins as Red approaches.

“Gramps is coming, along with a small team. He also said he’ll reach out to Agatha; busy or not, he said she’d be interested.”

“That’s great,” Red says, already feeling relieved. “Anything on the roof?”

“Nope. So it’s probably a ghost. Or renegades, but why they’d hole up at the top of the tower pushing out Pressure is beyond me.”

“I was thinking, we should do a premortem. Get Iko involved.”

“Already suggested that,” Leaf says with a grin. “Blue and Jean backed me up, apparently they do it all the time at her gym.”

“I’d like to claim credit, but they were doing it before I got there,” Blue says. “Iko said we’d have time while waiting anyway. Look, he’s talking about it now.”

“…planning that may be helpful to ensure we’re covering all our bases.” The sergeant gestures toward their group. “The whole thing might get tossed out once the big brains get here, but I don’t intend to be seen as sitting on my thumbs waiting to be rescued. Do any of you?”

“No sir,” the crowd chants, and Red feels a tug in his belly as he glimpses the Ranger Corps’ inner world for the first time in a while. The sense that his dad carried with him all the time, of being one who acts, who protects others, rather than being protected. He remembers his mom saying, with both exasperation and affection, that most rangers she met struggled to ever see themselves in a weak or helpless role, and that his father was no different.

“Didn’t think so. While most of us prepare, a small team will accompany the psychics up to the third floor to see what they can learn. Vera and Seto, you’re with me for planning. Hiro, Xavier, Gale, go with the psychics. Jon and Nathan, full equipment check. Hop to it everyone.”

Most of the two dozen rangers start unbuckling their belts and supply bandoliers, while six approach the group. As Iko hands the extra goggles they brought to the rangers that would be accompanying Jason, Leaf turns to Red and smiles. “Good luck.”

“See you soon.” He steps away from Leaf and Blue and makes his way toward the stairway with the others. It’s wide enough that they can walk three abreast, and Red ends up in the third row with just Artem, who turns to him as they start climbing.

“Hey, you know the Professor, right? Is he going to, uh…”

“Steal all the glory?” Red smiles. “No, he’s great about sharing. I don’t know if that’s always true, but as far as I’ve ever seen he likes to be included, but prefers watching other people learn.”

“Great, because this is awesome.” The older boy grins. “I thought there might be some interesting phenomenon here, but we might actually be among the first people to see a new species! It might even be an artificial pokemon.”

“You think?” Red considers their surroundings as they reach the second floor and walk across toward the third. “I guess there’s not a lot that’s natural for it to use.” Hallways in either direction from the main corridor are filled with cushioned benches and seats, incense burners, and small fountains, while the walls are lined with sarcophagi nameplates.

“Yeah, assuming it didn’t arise out of a pillow or something there’s nothing here but stone and bones. Let’s see, full list might be Ghost/Rock, Ghost/Ground, Ghost/Water, Ghost/Fire if we’re counting the incense… hey, we could find an Electric version of the lampent line if it comes from a light fixture. I always wondered what came first, there, the candle, the lamp, or the chandelier…”

“It could also just be another Ghost/Poison,” Red points out as they reach the stairs to the third floor (it’s strange to be in a place where the stairs only go up one floor at a time and are located so far from each other). “No reason all pokemon that come from a decomposing body have to be the same species, right?”

“Yeah, but… eh. Seems boring.” He smiles. “Not scientific, I know. We don’t even know if it’s a new species yet. Still, if it is a new species, I’d prefer some variety.”

“We’ve got enough Poison pokemon in Kanto already anyway,” one of the rangers just ahead of them grunts.

They reach the third floor, and the pace slows as Jason looks around, then finds a hallway full of cushioned chairs and benches to sit in. First he finds a small fountain, which he uses to wash his hands in the same cleansing ritual he does at home. As he does so, Red sees some tension leave his shoulders, and then he sits on one of the benches, folding his legs beneath him.

The rest of the group joins him except for the rangers, who stay standing. He looks around at all of them, seeming a bit unsure if he should say something, until Gale prompts, “Is there anything we can do for you?”

“No, thank you. Just… be ready.”

“What should we expect, as a worst case scenario?”

The medium hesitates. “There’s a very small chance that it attacks us?”

The rangers share glances, then begin summoning their pokemon: a krokorok, bisharp, and Gale’s mismagius again. It’s unusual for a dark trainer to raise psychics or ghosts, and Red reminds himself to let Blue know she is one in case he wants to ask her questions about it.

Red wonders if he should summon his own pokemon, but no, there’s limited space in the hallway and he’s not here for that. Instead he closes his eyes and breathes deep, briefly touching the minds around him.

Jason, most familiar, is preparing himself for what he expects is going to be another painful attempt to commune with a wild ghost. Red sends him a pulse of reassurance and confidence, which he responds to with gratitude.

Maria is second most familiar to him, worried and uncertain of herself, but also excited and curious. Artem is buzzing with curiosity too, and he can’t sense anything from Jean but cautious anticipation, which mirrors what the two rangers beside Gale feel as they prepare for whatever happens. Red is careful not to linger on the mismagius, but just sensing it is enough to feel uncomfortable, the psychic equivalent to a room full of overlapping voices that he can almost make sense out of.

“I’m going to begin,” Jason says, and Red focuses his attention on him. He can’t reach as high as the tower’s top floor himself, but he can watch as Jason extends his mental senses up… not literally, of course, Jason’s mind doesn’t actually go anywhere. But he can tell Jason finds something because his tranquil thoughts suddenly ripple with unease, then grief.

Red watches him attempt to do the same thing as before, to partition the emotion away. It takes him longer, and Red catches a splash of what he’s feeling, having to push down his own memories of Aiko and his dad until he can focus again…

And notice that Jason is still struggling with grief. Struggling to partition it again, and again, and again… more and more keeps building up, and Jason just keeps himself open to it, stays humble in accepting what the Ghost is pushing onto him, so much that Red has to switch to boggling-prostrate-before-the-universe himself just to keep himself from wallowing in memories of Aiko’s laugh—

—her father’s tears—

—Dad’s smile—

—Blue’s heart-wrenching sobs as a child, a memory he barely remembers—

—loss, and grief, so much grief—

Yes, Jason says, not with words but with being as he accepts the pain and extends an open hand for more, tries to form a connection. Understanding. Agreement. Shared sorrow.

But it doesn’t stop, and Red finally recognizes that something is wrong when Jean projects not just worry but alarm, and it doesn’t reach Jason. Red tries to do the same, and the openness that Jason holds forth just… doesn’t see it. Is too full of what he’s sensing from the ghost.

Red forces himself to ground and opens his eyes to see the medium’s face twisted in grief, tears pouring down his face. Maria is sitting beside him with his hand in hers, but looks unsure what to do, and Red feels dread and horror rising up in him. Trapped, Jason is trapped, there’s got to be something he can do…

“Hey,” Jean says, kneeling in front of Jason and gently shaking him. “Hey, come on, Jason, come back! Grey!”

Think. What would he do for you?

Red is frozen with indecision for a moment longer as the Rangers start to tersely discuss carrying him downstairs, then rushes up and to the fountain. He takes the ladle and fills it, then carries it back to Jason and holds up his palm. Don’t mess it up. Left hand… right hand… left hand… He lifts the hand to Jason’s lips so he can drink, come on drink…

Jason’s lips twitch, and Red lets his hand drop, then hurries to pick up one of the incense sticks, heart pounding as he moves it over Jason’s body. Placebos are real, it doesn’t matter if they make sense they’re real, they have real effects, come on Jason wake up…

Almost too late Red remembers the prayer beads, and he takes Jason’s hand and brings it up to his necklace, moving the fingers over the beads… and letting out a breath of relief as they tighten. And move.

He holds the stick where it is, just under Jason’s nose, and the rational side of him insists that that’s what makes the medium finally twitch and shudder and open his eyes, nose wrinkling. Red moves back just in time to avoid being sneezed on, and everyone lets out a breath or cry of relief as Jason blinks and wipes at his streaming eyes.

“What the hell was that?” Gale asks, looking relieved but also vibrating with adrenaline. Or maybe that’s just Red projecting; he sits back onto his bench, legs weak with relief as Artem claps him on the shoulder.

“New pokemon,” Jason coughs out. Maria hands him a water bottle, and he takes a long drink before clearing his throat and trying again. “Don’t know what it is. Strong. Angry.” He takes a shuddering breath and closes his eyes, wiping at them with his sleeve again. “Mad with grief.”

Gale stares at him, then nods. “Alright, back down we go. Can you walk?”

“Yes.” He still leans on Maria’s offered arm, looking wobbly, and turns to Red. “Thank you.” He looks at Jean. “Both of you. I could sense you, but…” He trails off, then looks up… and blood drains from his face. “Oh.”

Jean frowns, then goes stiff and breathes out, “Oh…”

Gale looks like she wants to grab and shake them. “Oh, what ‘oh?’ What’s ‘oh’ mean?”

Red was shielding as soon as he ended the link with Jason, relying on his partition to deal with the residue. Now he lowers it to send his own psydar pulse out, and what comes out instead is “Fuck” as he feels the swell of grief return before he can even do anything. He slams his shields back up and turns to Gale. “It’s projecting now, because… it might be uh, suicidal. So…” He remembers what he told Blue earlier and feels his heart kick back into high gear. “I think we’re going to have company soon.”

Pokemon: The Origin of Species

Chapter 87: Ghost Town


Hey everyone, welcome back! Brief comment about the last chapter’s battle: it bent a couple rules from the pokemon game in ways that feel justified, to me. The first was the whirlwind attack being able to clear field hazards the way defog does, since both are essentially the same type of attack, but divided by function. I’m not sure it makes sense for some flying pokemon to be able to create a whirlwind that can blow pokemon away, but not blow objects or fog away, so I’m ignoring the fact that the pidgey line doesn’t naturally learn defog outside of egg moves.

The second is ingrain, which normally stops a pokemon from being blown or scared away from battle, but also stops you from being able to withdraw it, which is just… strange. It’s not like it stops you from catching a pokemon in the wild, and there’s nothing about the move that to me indicates that it should make a pokemon immune to a pokeball’s effects. It seems to just be a balance decision they made, logic bedamned, and so I’m okay with putting the logic back in at the cost of game fidelity. One reader suggested that using an ultraball would overcome any possible difficulty some trainers would have in accounting for the increased mass, which is as good an explanation as any.

Enjoy the chapter, and hope everyone is staying safe this holiday. It would be a shame to get COVID just before vaccines start to roll out!

Red takes a deep breath, then knocks on Leader Sabrina’s door. Three seconds and a brief probe of his shielded mind later, he hears her say, “Come in.”

She still looks so tired, Unpartitioned Red notes as they step inside, and after a moment Red agrees. The bags under her eyes, the slight droop in her posture, the hair done up in a loose ponytail instead of her usual long, straight curtain… it’s clear Sabrina has yet to really recover from her long absence last month. Upon returning she spent nearly all her time working through the backlog of Challenge matches, and then Groudon and Kyogre awoke and she teleported to Hoenn to fight them.

It’s also clear that something changed for her when she did, though it’s hard to describe what. He could say that she’s been more reclusive than she was before she was gone, and that would be part of it. He could say that, when he does see her, she’s been distracted… but that would still only be part.

The best way he can think to put it is that she seems more like she’s doing everything by rote. Like her heart isn’t in the duties of a Gym Leader anymore, nor teaching her psychic students, nor researching and learning from them.

Whatever happened in Hoenn, it must have badly shaken her. Her psychic shields are as strong as ever, but the less tangible signs of strength, her force of personality, her aura of leadership, have faded somewhat as her clear distraction keeps her from being fully present. Even the question of whether psychics can lie just doesn’t seem to interest her the way it used to.

Of course, he knows the answer to that now. A month with Rowan taught him not just how to create partitions at will, but, finally, how to induce amnesia in himself… something he was relieved to finally be able to do.

Not that he remembers why, of course. And he doesn’t need to as long as he’s around other psychics that he might merge with; the vague sense that there are secrets hidden behind partitions is all that’s left, which is common enough among psychics as to be unremarkable. It was strange recognizing it for what it was, at first, but after some consideration it’s no different from everyone holding a sign noting that they have secrets. Unusual to be reminded of in day to day life, but completely understandable and unalarming in most contexts.

What is remarkable, as far as Red can tell, is that his current, partitioned self can be fed information as needed by his whole, unpartitioned self, which knows all the things he forgot. Re-establishing direct communication was one of the most valuable things he learned to do with Rowan, but far from the only one.

(What Rowan notably hasn’t been able to help Red do is come up with better ways to refer to himself and his unpartitioned self; apparently he sets his partitions along emotional lines, or things similar to them, and so just uses those.)

For his part, Rowan spent a lot of time recently trying to develop his own “tulpa,” and though he hasn’t quite succeeded yet as far as Red can tell, he can shift so abruptly between different mental states that even Red is worried about what the ability might do to him. The older psychic already writes intricately detailed personal contracts the way most people set alarms, and takes turns in any serious conversation letting various partitions up and down at a time to make sure he’s fully expressing the range of things he wants to, sometimes over a dozen in a row… more than once Red has simply sat by and waited for Rowan to finish arguing with his variously partitioned selves.

Not that Red is one to throw stones, but Rowan is definitely an odd one.

But none of that is why Red is here today.

“Good evening, Sensei.”

“Hello, Red. Please, join me.” The Leader is seated at a wide couch, each end of which has enough pillows to allow them to comfortably face each other. “Can I get you something to drink?”

“No, I’m alright.” He steps out of his flip-flops, leaving them by the door before going to sit on the couch and crossing his legs beneath him.

“You said it was important?”

So much for small talk. Or any other kind of talk. It’s fair enough, he wouldn’t have been able to get this audience just to chat. He senses his unpartitioned self silently acknowledging that, but still feeling a bit disappointed.

“Yeah, so… a couple days ago, Leader Erika reached out to me about joining a group she would like to form to find Renegades in Celadon.” Sabrina’s attention sharpens on him, overt enough that even he can pick it up without Partitioned Red’s help. “I came to see what you think of it.”

“What I think?”

“And for approval,” Red admits, though the truth is he’s hoping for disapproval, an excuse to say no without having to say it himself.

She watches him a moment, and he makes no effort to hide his reluctance. “Do you believe it would interfere with your duties here?”

“I’m not sure,” he admits. “The message was light on details.”

“Then it’s because of what you did in the Casino.” It’s not a question, but he still nods, and Sabrina returns it, then lapses into silence, gaze distant. Red waits, wondering if he should try to get a sense of her mood, if she would reciprocate the glimpse, but before he can try she stirs, taking a deep breath. “I never spoke with you about what happened down there. I meant to, but other things kept coming up… I’m sorry I haven’t made the time.”

Red just stares in surprise for a moment. “I… that’s okay, Sensei. I know you’ve been busy.”

“It’s a minimal excuse. You and your friends nearly died, and you used your psychic abilities to save many lives. I should have let you know that I’m proud, to call you my student.”

There’s something in her tone that’s hard to interpret, and Red’s too embarrassed by the praise to really try. He bows his head in thanks as he murmurs, “I just wish I could have done more.”

“We always do. But no matter how many were lost that day, I can still be glad you weren’t among them.”

Again, there’s something in her tone…

What if it wasn’t just being busy and tiredness, these past few weeks?

It’s a good thought, and Red debates if now is the right time to dig into it…

We probably won’t get a smoother segue.

Another good point. “I appreciate that.” He looks back up at her. “Forgive me for being forward, Sensei, but… did you lose someone that day?”

Sabrina’s eyes widen for just a moment, and then she’s the one that drops her gaze. “Yes.” The word is quiet. “A very old, very dear friend.”

A stab of empathy, an echo of pain from Aiko’s loss, and his father’s before that. He sits with the feelings for a moment, acknowledging them, letting himself mourn them anew… then lets his breath out, and focuses on the sensation of it to let the thoughts go, let the emotions get taken gently back behind his partition, knowing his unpartitioned self will be able to work through the feelings, however painfully, so he doesn’t have to deal with them himself… a far more useful trick than multithreading mental math. It’s still a distraction that might lead to some missed thoughts or insights, but it’s far better than what he used to have to deal with. “I’m so sorry, Sensei.”

“I am too. The worst part is, I don’t even know if he’s dead or not.” She’s staring into the distance again. “A body was never found.”

Damn. He tries to imagine not knowing for sure if his dad or Aiko were alive or not, and even with the partition taking that pain too, it leaves an ache in his chest. “That’s horrible. It would be distracting to anyone.”

“Yes. It’s hard not to think that he’s probably dead, after all this time. And if not, that’s almost worse. The idea of him be out there somewhere, hurt… alone.” She takes a deep breath, and the next words come out in a murmur. “He always hated being alone.”

Red wonders what circumstances the person would have to be in, to be missing and lost for so long. Flying between regions? Maybe someone on the frontier? Or someone like Bill, living alone in seclusion? No, surely their place would have been checked. And if they got lost in the wilderness somewhere, and haven’t reached a town or Ranger Outpost by now, then… yeah. Probably dead.

“It’s painful,” Sabrina goes on. “Knowing that I was so busy that day that I couldn’t… I wasn’t there for him. I wasn’t there for a lot of people.”

Red doesn’t know what else to say, so he just nods, lost in his own memories and distant guilt.

“Tell me about it?”

He blinks and finds her gaze on his again. For a moment he thinks she’s talking about Aiko, what it was like for him afterward. Then he reconnects the question to what she said before, and he suddenly feels wary. But he has no reason not to talk about it other than discomfort.

“It was scary. I couldn’t tell how badly I was hurt, let alone the others, and when Blue wasn’t waking up…” He swallows. Those were a desperate couple of minutes, the most frightening in his life, even counting those moments in Viridian when they were surrounded by pikachu, or everything that happened during the storm. He thought they were all going to suffocate or bleed out, and still sometimes wakes in the middle of the night gasping for air. “I leave the light on, now, when I go to sleep. So I don’t wake in the dark.”

It makes him feel ashamed, weak, admitting that. A reminder that he’s still a kid who can’t handle the real world. But it feels only fair, after he asked her such a personal question, and Sabrina just nods, face sympathetic. “It’s amazing that you managed to keep your psychic concentration, even through that. What was your first sign that the renegades were there?”

The wariness deepens. Talking or thinking about this part in particular always makes the discomfort worse. “I didn’t. Keep my concentration, I mean. It was hard to focus on any one thing at a time, so I used my psydar instead, and only realized when the first two people… when their minds vanished at the same time, right next to the golem that I thought was summoned to save them.”

“And then you focused on it?”

“With the help of my partitioned self, yeah. I realized the next time it attacked a survivor that it was able to see humans as threats. After that it was just a matter of warning my friends.”

She studies him until eventually her lips twitch in a slight smile. “You don’t like the limelight much, do you?”

“Not… really, no.” He wonders if she’s going to try to convince him to be more public about what he did, maybe talk about how good it would look for psychics. That thought in particular makes him deeply uneasy. “Blue and Leaf have talked to me about this sort of thing a lot. I’ve been trying to lean into it more, but for something like this… it would feel wrong.”

“I suppose I can understand that. But you also don’t want your more unique psychic abilities becoming public?”

“Yeah.” He looks down. Looks like she saw right through him. “Don’t want to have to worry about what people think of me, and of psychics in general.”

Sabrina chuckles, and Red blinks at her, wondering what he said that was funny. “I used to worry about that a lot,” she explains upon noticing his confusion. “I’m not saying I don’t anymore, but… I understand. The problem is, I’ve begun to think that this house of cards will come tumbling down sooner or later. It’s just a matter of time before some psychic somewhere does something new and frightening enough that the public turns against us.”

She’s looking off into the distance again, and Red tries to think of something to say to such a bleak prediction when she suddenly asks, “You used your partition while we spoke, right?”

“Yeah.” He’s unsurprised that she can pick up on it after having merged with him while he had the partition both up and down, but the sudden change of topic takes him off guard. “Why?”

“Your control is impressive. I know I haven’t been as dedicated lately, to your education, or to pursuing the task I set for all of you. I would be lying if I didn’t admit that none of it is as important now as it was before…” Again there’s something heavy in her tone, something in the way she trails off momentarily, that makes him feel a surge of empathy, and then she rallies. “But it is still important. I’m sorry it took you coming to see me to make me confront that I’ve been shirking my duties. Since arriving here, you’ve been hardworking, shown good judgement, demonstrated initiative, and of course, loyalty. In normal times that would all be rewarded more thoroughly, but for now…”

She trails off again, this time seeming to be hard at thought over something, and Red patiently waits. Eventually she nods to herself and meets his gaze. “I’ll speak with Erika to see what she wants from you, exactly. In the meantime, you’re still trying to lie to Rowan?”

“Yeah, and I think we’re close. I can lie about things and not know that I’m lying, but as long as he can tell I have partitions up, he knows that one might be an amnesia.”

“So he can’t tell if you’re lying, but he can’t verify that you’re not, either… only use the fact that you don’t bring your partitions down as evidence that you are.”

“Exactly. If this is possible, that’s the trick right there; hiding a partition. Once you forget you have partitions—”

“There’s no way to tell that something might be missing,” Sabrina says, and suddenly she sounds so tired again. Or defeated, maybe, as he confirms what she already said about trust in psychics being a house of cards.

Red nods, then reluctantly adds, “I mean, technically that might already have happened.”

Sabrina glances at him, then nods. “Because neither you nor Rowan would be able to tell if the other had pulled it off. Not long ago I would have been ecstatic to hear about this, and terrified, of course. The age of trust may be coming to an end, and all that will be left is… a form of meta-trust, I suppose.”

Red remembers his conversation with Leaf, about the way Pressure affected her during the storm, and how she fought back against it. “Trust in the person, that if they are hiding something, it’s for good reason?”

Sabrina smiles. It’s a small smile, and a tired one, but it seems to bring some warmth back to her features. “Yes. That’s exactly it. Not something we can afford to do in every situation, of course, but… hopefully in enough, that our society can go on functioning.”

Without turning on its psychics, she doesn’t add. She doesn’t need to, for him and his unpartitioned self to both think it.

Once Red returns to his room, he takes a minute to note some thoughts and observations from the meeting, takes a shower, then lies in bed and, little by little, brings his partition down.

His breath catches as the world loses some vague shine. He stays present in his body, noticing the way it feels heavier, and the way his thoughts seem to slow and become more easily distracted.

And then the memories come.

Memories of what really happened under the Casino that night.

Fear to panic, as Glen was knocked unconscious.

Panic to desperation, as the pokemon moved in for the kill.

Desperation to determination, as he realized what he had to do.

The hardest thing he’s ever done. And the most difficult; on its own the sakki is just the removal of conditioning. If it was all he projected, the pokemon would have been as likely to kill Maria or each other as the renegade.

Instead he also had to use his partitioned self to project the feeling of the renegade as the enemy so that the vulpix would run past the two pokemon in front of it to attack him.

To murder him.

Hey, Partitioned Red says, mental voice sharp. None of that. We’re not murderers, let alone renegades. Trainers are allowed to defend themselves, we looked up the laws, remember?

He does, thanks to the reminder. He pored over them while at the hospital with Blue, waiting for him to wake up, so he knows that technically what he did shouldn’t get him branded.

And yet.

He remembers what it was like, in that trailer on Mount Moon. He remembers the fear from the others in the room, their disgust, their apparent focus on reaching a conclusion then and there, rather than taking more time to investigate the truth. And he remembers the pressure to conform. To pass judgement, to not hold things up with niggling doubts or uncertainties.

The thought of being on the receiving end of that sort of situation makes him feel sick with fear if he contemplates it too long.

What he did under the Casino has never been done before, or at least never investigated. If he’s charged, he can’t predict what attitudes would be, or even who the witnesses would be. Leaf and Maria and Lizzy? Surely none of them would vote against him, right?

But even if cleared, it would be absurdly optimistic to not expect to be constantly viewed with fear and suspicion afterward by others. And given the risks involved if some other psychic learns to do the same thing, there’s no way something like this would stay quiet; he’s pretty sure it would be the first global news to displace the cataclysm.

Everyone would know that he could turn their pokemon against them at any time. He would be a pariah… along with every other psychic in the world, probably, through no fault of their own. Which is the actual reason why joining some task force to hunt for Renegades is the last thing he wants to do, and why his partitioned self feels so uncomfortable when it, or what happened that night, comes up in discussion. He can’t do anything that might put him in a position to accidentally let the secret out.

Well. Any more out. He knew that he would be safest if he never told anyone… but he still had to tell Maria.

It was his fault, after all. Once he was determined to do whatever it took to save her and Glen, he still hadn’t been thinking straight. It’s so obvious, in retrospect, that he could have used the renegade’s own pokemon to kill him. Instead he’d been stuck thinking of the vulpix as their only available resource. The idea of using someone’s pokemon against them just feels… wrong.

It still does, even after he ended up using the other renegade’s sandslash on her, lacking another option. But if he thought of it to save Maria, she never would have known something strange had happened beyond the renegade’s pokemon turning on him.

Instead the fear that others would find out her pokemon killed someone was eating her up inside, all that night and the next day. He couldn’t just let her keep believing she might have been at fault in any way, and if she revealed what actually happened, whether out of confusion or guilt, she might have gotten herself in trouble, or even launched an investigation.

So he told her. She was shocked, but grateful, particularly when he assured her that he would come forward if any suspicion ever fell on her. She insisted in return that she would take his secret to her grave, since he saved her life.

Saved all their lives.

And maybe doomed psychics everywhere.

Catastrophic thinking, Partitioned Red insists. Focus on the positive!

Right. Positives. He takes his notebook out and starts writing:

1) All my friends are alive, and we managed to save some strangers too.

2) We helped expose whatever was going on under the Casino. If all of us died it might have been covered up.

3) If I ever face a renegade, I can probably survive as long as they don’t use Dark pokemon.

That last thought sends a chill through him, but also reveals something else; a door in his thoughts, one he dares not open for fear of what’s on the other side.

All truth is worth knowing. Or don’t we believe that anymore?

Red closes his eyes and lets himself follow the thought.

Maybe he should reveal what he can do.

Maybe the knowledge that it’s possible will be on net beneficial to the world at large.

And maybe he can do more good with it. Become a ranger, or even a renegade hunter…

The thought makes him want to turn away again. Red hasn’t watched or read a lot of fiction, relatively speaking, but from what he remembers, whether the heroes in stories even used their special powers isn’t often seriously explored in most.

What they did with them, sure. One character he particularly identified with was Dr. Banner, a scientist who, through a freak lab accident, “evolved” into a new form of human with incredible fighting potential and literal Fighting abilities. All he wanted to do was continue his research, but instead Dr. Banner repeatedly found himself in situations where he had to use his new powers (guided by his human intellect) to save others.

But while the show sometimes featured others treating the transformed scientist as a freak, and dealt with his desire to be “normal” again, he was never in danger of being hunted by society and executed just for what he could do. At worst there were a couple episodes where some immoral scientists or renegades tried to capture and study or use him. Most people in the show saw him as a hero.

Would even Red’s friends and family see him as one? Or would the danger he represents scare them, too?

Mom wouldn’t abandon us. Neither would Blue and Leaf, and Professor Oak wouldn’t let anything happen.

Red closes his eyes. The words from his partitioned self are defiant, but there’s no hiding the uncertainty under the words, particularly at the end. Maybe they would all stand by him, and maybe he wouldn’t be executed. But he would live the rest of his life under a cloud of suspicion, and if any pokemon around him ever accidentally hurt someone, he would be blamed.

He wouldn’t even be able to prove his innocence, once they knew he’s also studied how to lie to other psychics.

Despair rises like a black tide, and it’s hard to fight it down. There doesn’t seem to be a way out. Like Sabrina said about the view of psychics in general: it’s all a house of cards. Sooner or later, it will come tumbling down.

Irrationally, even feeling like it’s inevitable, what scares Red more than the actual potential outcomes is the idea that he might be the one who causes it.

A probe of his mental shield derails the forming depressive spiral, and as he quickly builds his partition back up there’s a knock at the door.

He takes a deep breath as the world lightens and grows clearer, and rubs his face. Yes, things are difficult. The worries of another cataclysm, of new legendaries appearing, of people fearing psychics that can lie… it makes sense to be afraid. But they can come together to prepare, and the real worst case scenario for psychics is they become as distrusted as dark people. He’s not the only one with doubts; Leaf is experimenting with fundamentally rewriting the brains of millions of pokemon so they can live in better harmony with humans, despite her views on their moral value. Blue gets up and does his best to become the greatest Champion in history every day while knowing that some people will always view his motives with suspicion. Red can’t do any less just because the same thing might happen to him.

“Coming,” he calls out, then walks to the door as he lowers his shield and probes back. “Hey Jason,” he says as he opens the door, and sees his peer is dressed in an informal yukata today. After spending some time at Celadon Gym, where the members used their clothing as a way to communicate everything from rank to expertise to mood, he can’t help but read into Jason’s choice of modest dark cloth. He looks like he’s in mourning, or maybe just expressing a particularly somber attitude, though the mental impression Red got was more… worried. And of course his fingers move over the beads of his necklace as he turns it around and around, a sure sign that something’s bothering him.

“Good evening, Red. I’d like to talk to you about something. May I come in?”

“Sure, I’m free.” Red steps back, curious and a little concerned. Jason is generally formal, but as they’ve gotten to know each other better he’s been a bit more relaxed in private with him. “Can I get you something?” he asks as he closes the door, echoing Sabrina.

“I’m alright, thank you.”

Red nods and leads the older boy to the beanbags he set up for himself and guests. Jason sits carefully on his, adjusts a few times to get comfortable, then continues to fidget with his necklace.

Red lowers his shield to read him again, just a brief dip that communicates Jason’s uncertainty and worry. He can’t recall ever seeing his friend like this, and the silence stretches out for what feels like a minute before Red dares to break it. “So…?”

“I’m sorry, I’m still not sure if I have the right to ask…”

Maybe he should be more trepidatious, but curiosity is stronger. “Take your time. Maybe start with what’s got you so nervous?”

Jason nods, and takes a breath. “Do you remember when I told you my upbringing, in Lavender Town?” Red nods. “My family still lives there, as does my first sensei. Over the past week, she’s been telling me that something is disturbing the Ghosts at Lavender Tower.”

Ah, there’s the trepidation. “Disturbing, how?”

“There are more of them. The rangers guarding the tower have reported no unusual activity, Ghosts haven’t attacked anyone recently so no one seems concerned. But Sensei Reigen says whatever is happening started shortly after the cataclysm, and has only been getting worse since then.”

The words spread a chill through Red’s stomach, cold fingers creeping up his torso until he can feel each heartbeat. “She told people that, and they still haven’t looked into it? The rangers haven’t looked into it?”

“They have, but apparently found no evidence of impending attack…”

“Maybe Sensei can—”

“I already asked her. She said I could investigate as long as I don’t do it alone, but is too busy to go herself.”

“Ah.” Red says, then, “Shit.”

“I’m sorry, you don’t have to—”

“No.” Red takes a breath, trying to control his fear, and the memories they invoke of standing on the roof and seeing that dark sphere, feeling that burning hunger… “But I’ll still go with you.”

Jason searches his gaze. “Really?”

“Yeah, of course. It seems important, and besides, my mother’s in Lavender Town for work. I want to make sure she’s okay. But… why me? My only experience with Ghosts was with you.”

“I am experienced enough on that front. What I lack is experience in… other things. Your journey has exposed you to many dangers, and you’ve been involved in organized groups. I was hoping…”

“Ah.” Red smiles as he gets it. “You’re hoping for Blue and his friends to get involved.”

Jason nods. “This is why I was hesitant to ask. You have a unique and analytical way of thinking that might see things I would miss, so I am happy to have you come as well. But I don’t know how dangerous the investigation will be, and I don’t know many other trainers, and it seemed like you could form a group who would be interested and competent more easily than I.” Jason pauses to breathe, and Red hides his smile at the sight of the normally stoic medium’s obvious embarrassment.

“I’m not offended, Jason.” He’s pretty sure he wouldn’t be even if he couldn’t sense his sincerity. Part of the point in getting involved with What Comes Next was to improve coordination for important tasks, and he’s used it himself to get access to unown research. He can’t resent someone seeking him out to make use of the network too. “I’ll put a general message out tonight, and talk to Blue to see if he’s got time. I wouldn’t get your hopes up, he’s pretty focused on getting badges, but he might know someone else who’s up for it.”

Jason lets out a breath. “Thank you, Red. I was going to send a message to Mistress Agatha, but… if Sensei doesn’t think it’s worth investigating herself yet, I want something more substantial before I bother an Elite about it.”

“Yeah, I get it. But you should message her anyway.” He still remembers the wild impulse he had in Viridian Forest to randomly message Giovanni, and his shock at actually getting an answer. “What’s the worst thing that happens, you waste, like, ten seconds of her time? You don’t think she’ll be mad at you, do you?”

“…I suppose not. Alright, I will.”

“Good. So when did you want to head out?”

“You are the one doing me the favor. When are you free?”

Red thinks through his schedule for the next few days. “I’ll pack tonight and reach out to Blue to see if he’s in touch with anyone that might want to come. Tomorrow I have to take care of some errands, and I’ll do some research on the issue. Let’s add a day for others to prepare, and tentatively say three days from now?”

“Wonderful.” Jason smiles, looking much more his usual self. “Thank you, Red.”

Blue, as it turns out, is more willing to come along than Red expected.

“You actually caught me at the perfect time,” Blue admits. From the background noises it sounds like he’s walking through the city. “Most of the gang is still working their way through the challenge matches here. I wasn’t planning to go to Saffron without them, but a lot of them are part of other groups now too, so it’s not as necessary for us all to move around together.”

“Makes sense,” Red says as he climbs the stairs toward the roof of his building. Everyone will want to journey with the trainers that fought in those scenarios at Vermilion, and most of them are heavily involved in What Comes Next. “How many do you think will want to come with you, then?”

“Of those not done with their challenge matches or busy with their own projects, I’d say at least three, plus anyone else here who might be interested in coming. Any guesses for what’s happening, yet?”

“Well, the data is all secondhand, but assuming it’s accurate… it’s possible that the earthquakes changed something in Lavender Tower or around it that made it easier for Ghosts to breed.”

From what Red remembers reading a while back, while the few “living” pokemon considered Ghost type, such as jellicent and decidueye, breed in recognizably biological fashion, “non-living” Ghost pokemon reproduce by spreading incorporeal “seeds” in objects that then become their offspring. Red watched, fascinated, as a sped up recording of a litwick breeding room (just a bunch of candles set out in an area where chandelure and lampent could freely roam through) eventually showed one of the candles abruptly flare to life, yellow eyes blinking into existence under its blue flame.

And so, with Lavender Tower being mostly occupied by the gastly line, that would mean…

“What, like there might just be a ton of extra dead bodies decomposing all over the place?” Blue asks. “Wouldn’t people notice that?”

Red shrugs and smiles. “That’s part of what we’ll be investigating.”

“Right. Well in any case, I’m in. I’ll ask around to see who else wants to come. What about Leaf?”

“Heading to the ranch now, I’ll ask her in person.”

“Cool. Tell her I said hi, gotta go.”

The call ends, and Red opens the door to the roof. The morning sun is bright and untouched by clouds, but can’t quite take the kiss of early winter from the air, and he zips up his jacket before bringing Ranch out.

The abra has grown to twice its size since he caught it, despite not being in any battles. Melding with its mind is as easy as adjusting his partition, and soon he’s experiencing the brisk morning air through two bodies. Ranch’s eyes stay closed, but its nostrils flare as it scents for danger, then for food… which are the only two things it’s particularly good at identifying by smell. Still, Red feels Ranch’s body relax slightly as it smells him, the scent associated with family, and he takes a moment to send reassuring feelings back while digging some berries out of the side pouch of his bag.

His own mouth waters as his pokemon smells the berries, then hungrily laps them from his palm, mouth filling with tart pulp and sweet juices. Once Ranch is fed, Red starts concentrating on his destination… Pallet Town.

Leaf isn’t expecting Red for about another ten minutes, which means Red has time to practice free teleportation. Most of the work involves merging with a pokemon so thoroughly that they can use their trainer’s senses as well as the trainer can theirs, which is necessary to reach the point that your memories are as real to them as their own. After spending every spare moment merged with his abra over the course of weeks, he believes he’s finally accomplished that.

All that’s left is concentrating so thoroughly on a location he’s been to before that, when he triggers the teleportation command, they go there instead of the registered location. And there’s nowhere he knows as well as his childhood home. His mother told him that she was renting the place out to a couple, but that they were staying in the guest bedroom, and that her room and his were left as is. If he can just focus on what it felt like to be in his room…

The smell of linen and books. Safety. Warmth blanket books smell-of-breakfast quiet-nights-screenglow

He feels the sense of familiarity projected and echoed back by Ranch. Something tickles in his brain, a sensation he’s not entirely sure is physical rather than mental (if there’s even a difference), and he almost, for a moment, understands what it is abra do when they teleport, almost understands in some wordless way how teleportation doesn’t interact with the physical world at all, but rather the one in which minds leave an impression that can be read and communicated with…

…the astral realm…

…and then the sensation starts to disperse, failing to catch onto something solid, and finally fades as his thoughts scatter.

Red opens his eyes with a sigh. He’s close, far closer than he would be at this point in his psychic career if he hadn’t practiced mirroring the mental states of others as they use free teleportation, but there’s still some final bit of familiarity or connection he’s missing, or that Ranch is. It would be so convenient to be able to just have one abra that lets him travel anywhere, rather than having to constantly swap the registered locations of the ones he has.

He checks the time to see if he can try again, but sees that as usual more time passed than it seemed, and instead just gives the mental command to teleport to Ranch’s registered spot. The world twists around him as Ranch links their minds, and pulls their bodies sideways through reality, causing him to stumble a bit as he lands on the grass outside Aiko’s home.

He reinforces his pokemon’s success, then withdraws him and looks around. Most of the damage to the ranch was repaired within a week, though the two ponds seem to just be permanently bigger and merged into one now. Mr. Sakai is in the process of building a dam (or a weir, maybe, Red isn’t sure what the right term is) between them to keep two distinct bodies of water for aquatic pokemon with different preferences. Red can see him now, wearing just a bathing suit as he wades into the shallow water connecting the two deep pools.

Red waves to him, but isn’t seen. He debates going over to say hello, maybe offer his help. He still feels a wretched guilt in his stomach every time he talks to Aiko’s father. Still fears the condemnation, the rage, the tears.

It’s getting easier. Little by little, every time it doesn’t happen, he feels safer assuring himself it won’t.

But part of him still feels like he deserves it. What helps is knowing that Leaf and even Blue feel the same, to some degree.

“Red!”

Leaf is jogging over to him with a smile, and he smiles back as she reaches him for a hug. With his partition up he might have frozen, blushed, stammered out a hello. Without it, he can just appreciate the friendly comfort for what it is.

Like Sabrina, Leaf is also aware of the differences in him. When she pulls away, her gaze searches his. “How are you?”

“Not bad, actually. I’ve had it down since this morning.”

“Wow. Is that a new record?”

“Yeah.” He takes a deep breath of the fresh country air. “It’s getting easier, as long as I don’t get hit with something bad.” Like whatever is behind his amnesia’d partition.

“I’m glad.” She links her arm with his and leads him back toward the bags of feed. “So what adventure have you come to sweep me off to this time?”

“Hmm. I think you’ve been the adventure sweeper up until now.”

“That can’t be right… what about the time you took me to Bill’s house?”

“Doesn’t count, we were already journeying together. You weren’t swept, more of a… tag-along.”

“Hmph. That’s far less romantic sounding. Guess you’re going to discount the cruise by that logic too?”

“Yep.” Partition down or not, his pulse quickens at the word “romantic,” but somehow it’s easy to keep the banter going. “And going to face Zapdos. In fact, you’re right, you’re not the sweeper. It’s been your whole thing from the very first day at Pallet Lab: see me about to go do something cool, tag along for the ride.”

“I’m sorry, which of us cracked open a murderous conspiracy and met Leader Giovanni? If you weren’t Laura’s son you probably wouldn’t have even been told about the hacker spy ninja… hacker ninja spy?… ninja hacker spy I’ve been investigating.”

“Well—”

“Mount Moon was my suggestion too, and I’m not discounting it just because we were already journeying together.”

“If we—”

“Also you’re not giving me enough credit for getting us all trapped by the worst earthquakes in Kanto history. I had to practically drag you to that near death experience, and I deserve credit for it.”

Her words are deceptively light, but Red can’t help snorting, and her responding smile brings out his own. “Okay, we’ve both swept each other into adventures. This one’s spooky though.”

“We haven’t done a spooky adventure before,” she concedes. “We going to see your mom?”

“No, though we can still say hi. Something’s up at Lavender Tower, and I want you to come investigate it with us.”

“Why me? I don’t know much about Ghosts.”

Red smiles. “That’s what I said about myself, so I’ll give you the same answer I was given: you think in a different way than I do, and you’ve done things no one else has as a result. I want you on any adventures I go on.”

He’s thrilled to see a slight blush spread over her cheeks, and she looks away briefly, then back. “Well, sure. Plus, someone’s got to keep you company the next time you run at a nidoqueen by yourself.”

There’s a brief flash of fear and guilt from the sight of Leaf on the wet pavement, followed by a deeper echo as he feels Aiko’s shirt slip from his fingers. He almost brings the partition up, but takes a moment to breathe instead, to focus on the warmth of Leaf’s arm in his. “Thanks. So, uh. How is the ninja investigation going?”

“Ac-tually, I may have hit a breakthrough on that,” she says with a grin as they reach the sacks of pokeballs and food, each taking a pair. “Remember my friend Natural?”

“Yeah?”

“I might have sent him a copy of documents I found in the secret lab.”

Red stops and stares at Leaf. She seems a bit nervous, but her smile doesn’t fade, and eventually Red grins back. “Does Mom know?”

“Yeah, I told her after it became clear that someone leaked a lot of the same info. I thought it was Natural, but he swore it wasn’t, and I believe him; the info on the web is slightly different from what I got.”

“So you’ve got a source of Silph documents that could be used as a lure for someone else looking for them?”

“Oh, sure, maybe. But it also proves that whoever leaked those documents had a different but similar source, likely the files from a computer at the same lab.”

Now Red gets it. “You think they’re a police detective?”

Leaf smiles. “It would explain their skills and motive more than an ex-employee. And now that they don’t feel safe bringing the info to Laura, they’re just putting the info online to damage Silph as much as possible.”

“Huh. Makes sense… but didn’t you think the ninja is from Fuchsia?”

“We don’t know where the CPD’s information was sent and if they’re a Fuchsia officer they might have friends in other places. I know, it’s not airtight, but at this point I’ll take any narrowing parameters. I’ve been working on cross-checking Fuchsia and Celadon police, along with Saffron for good measure.”

Red nods. “No, it makes sense. Want a hand with it after the chores are done?”

“Absolutely. Maybe we’ll be able to surprise Laura with more than just our presence.”

Leaf joins Red and Jason in Saffron a couple days later, and they have lunch at a restaurant on the eastern edge of the city. The air is chilly, and Red finds himself constantly glancing at Leaf, whose cheeks are rosy above her collared coat and scarf. He feels comfortable enough with his jacket buttoned up, but he keeps his hands wrapped around his hot mug of tea as they wait for Blue and his group to arrive. When they finally do, Red sees only one other familiar face.

“So the bad news is, fewer people were free to come than I expected,” Blue explains as he hugs Leaf and knocks fists with Red, then turns to Jason. “Hi, I’m Blue. This is Maria, a journey mate of mine, and Jean, a psychic from the Celadon Gym. Jean, this is Red and Leaf, and I assume Jason.”

“It’s nice to meet you all,” Jean says with a bow. She has pale skin and dark red hair, but it’s her kimono that draws the eye, a complex swirl of patterns and colors that Red has rarely seen outside of the garden gym. “I’m looking forward to working with two of Leader Sabrina’s students.”

“Yeah, good to have you,” Red says, gaze quickly moving back to Maria and wondering why she decided to come.

“I have a ton of questions for you,” Leaf says to Jean, smiling, then turns to Maria. “Hi, Maria.”

“Hello, Leaf.” The pale girl smiles back. These days she still wears a dark cloak, but the wide black hat is gone, leaving her murkrow to perch on her shoulder, its dark feathers blending with her hair. “Red.” Her eyes meet his, and there’s something he can’t quite read in them. Then she’s looking to the third in their group.

“Thank you all for coming.” The medium bows. “I don’t see how this is bad news, as this many trainers is more than I expected.”

“Yeah, you said that like there’s good news coming?” Red asks Blue.

“Yep. The good news is, our mission got sponsored.” Blue unclips a container ball and summons a box from it. He opens the top and starts passing around the contents. “Remember that anti-surreality tech that Silph was working on?”

Red examines the goggles he’s handed. They’re surprisingly heavy, and he wonders what the lenses are made of. He remembers reading about early experiments to counter the effects of surreality, including viewing ghost pokemon through glass, thin cloth, even a recording cell phone, since they appear “normal” on camera. But something about the physical proximity combined with viewing them, even indistinctly or by digital representation, is important… as if it’s the attention that matters, the act of observing.

The strongest Ghost pokemon still only affect those within fifty meters, which means the audience in a stadium are safe, but the effects of young or weak Ghost types all extend beyond the range of even an ultra ball. With goggles like these on, catching Ghost pokemon would be much easier. “I thought they weren’t on the market yet…”

“They’re not,” Leaf says as she carefully puts hers on. “When their schematics leaked online, Silph knew that a patent lawsuit would only help stop commercial sales. Governments and organizations are just going to make their own unless Silph starts throwing its weight around… which means you got these from a gym, or the Rangers, or… Oh, duh.”

“Yep. A few engineers over at Pallet Labs built one to help study Ghost pokemon. From there it wasn’t hard to replicate the rest.”

“Nice.” Replication was always possible with pokeball tech, but only for very simple constructs. One of the side effects of the advanced replication breakthrough showcased on the SS Anne is the ability to do it with much higher fidelity, which has apparently made all sorts of technology much cheaper after shaking up the manufacturing industry. (And the world of sculptures: some guy from the pokemon cloning research team going online by ‘Froggy’ started selling anatomically perfect statues of pokemon made from various materials, instantly shaped in various poses based on what the pokemon was commanded to do at moment of capture.) The dropped price of pokedex in particular has been a huge boon to many, though all Red could think when he saw the new prices was how Aiko could probably have afforded a new pokedex of her own years before she met them if the technology had advanced earlier.

“With these we should be more prepared than a group of our size would normally be,” Blue says as he puts the box away, then takes out his box of riding gear. “I did put the news out on the net, of course, so more people might join us in Lavender.”

“To be clear, this is just for protective purposes?” Jason asks as he gives his goggles one last thoughtful look, then takes out his own box of biking gear and puts it inside in exchange for a helmet. “Our main objective is to study what may be happening at the Tower.”

“Sure, but if there’s any chance of an impending rampage, we need to be able to cut their numbers down.” Blue finishes putting his pads and helmet on, but doesn’t lift his bike out of its box. Instead he grins at Red and Leaf. “You guys want to see something cool?” Without waiting for an answer, he lifts a great ball. “Go, Soul!”

The arcanine appears in a flash, and lifts its head, sniffing as it looks around them. It’s big up close in the way that has as much to do with presence as actual size; the very air feels warm around it, and Red can smell the faint burning-charcoal scent of its fur.

“He’s beautiful, Blue,” Leaf says with a smile. “But you should have said—”

“Something hot, yeah, I know. That’s not the cool part, though Soul is pretty awesome. This is.” Instead of taking his bike out of the box, he lifts a saddle.

“You’ve been riding him?” Red asks, surprised.

“Just in training rooms. Figured this would be a good time for a—”

“Field test?” Leaf grins.

Blue looks at Leaf, then the open grasslands ahead, then sighs and straps the saddle onto his pokemon one side at a time. “Live run,” he mutters. “Yours is better.”

“I know.”

Red smiles and waits until he’s finished adjusting the straps tight, then takes out his list and adds a new line. “Saddle secure?”

Blue rolls his eyes. “You’re still on that? Yes, they’re… what’s another word for secure?”

“Safe,” Jason offers.

“Stable,” Jean suggests.

Blue glares at them, then Leaf as she starts giggling. Finally his lips curl in a slight smile, and he shakes his head as he climbs up onto his saddle. “Come on, boy, let’s get away from these losers.” He squeezes his knees, and the rest of them watch as his pokemon leaps forward, causing Blue to whoop as they race ahead.

Red pulls his bike up. “Better get moving, with our luck he’s going to run right into another wigglytuff if we don’t—” There’s the distant sound of pokeball discharge, and he looks up to see Blue’s pidgeotto flying ahead of him and his arcanine. “Well, we should still hurry after them.” A rapid series of explosive discharges sound as they each summon their own pokemon; Red brings out Pikachu to ride in his basket, and Butterfree to fly above him. Once everyone’s ready he takes off after Blue, the others close behind.

It’s been nearly half a year since Red travelled in a group, and it takes a few minutes for the instincts to come back. Check the sides, check your travel mates, eyes front, repeat. Watch for tall patches or hills that might obscure pokemon near the road. He’s never been the one to set the pace before, but once they catch up to Blue he takes the lead, while Jason and Jean form the other two points of a triangle for maximum spread of psychic threat scanning. He’s nervous about the possibility of battle after so long without being in one, but he does his best to project confidence for Jason’s sake; with their senses both open to their surroundings, it’s easy to notice that the medium seems uncertain about something, almost uncomfortably so. Jean by comparison seems to be enjoying herself.

Red sends Jason a pulse of concerned curiosity, wondering if he’s just nervous about being out in the wilderness, tame as the route between Saffron and Lavender is. Jason sends back appreciation and deferral, so Red waits until their first rest stop near a ranger outpost to approach him.

“It’s nothing, really,” Jason assures him without Red even needing to say anything. The medium is lying on a small hill, and Red joins him while the others feed their pokemon and Blue drinks a whole water bottle down, body covered in sweat. “It’s been a while since I did not have the luxury of being able to ground loose thoughts, that’s all.”

“I can leave you to meditate if you’d prefer,” Red says. “But I’d like to help if I can.”

Jason hesitates. “I don’t mean to question your leadership, or that of your friend… I know you both are more experienced than I am at facing danger.”

Is that what this is about? “Jason, you’re not here as an adviser, it’s your mission. Blue may be famous, but he’s not conceited about it. He’ll listen if you have something you want to say.”

“That is… reassuring.”

“You only seem slightly reassured.” Red tries to make a joke of it, but he’s never seen his fellow psychic so unsure of himself. “I never asked, did you have journeymates before you became Sabrina’s student?”

“Briefly. Four trainers who were passing through Lavender Town accepted me as a fifth companion while they explored the outlying areas, and then let me accompany them to Saffron.”

Red tries imagining that; leaving Pallet Town with four older, more experienced trainers who he just recently met. He would have felt both eager to prove himself and worried about being a burden. “And they weren’t inclined to listen much to the new guy?”

“Well, I didn’t have any experience or insight to offer, outside of my expertise with Ghost and Psychic pokemon. But they did not include me in their discussions of strategy or planning. It made sense. They knew what they were doing, and I was the inexperienced outsider…”

“But now that we’re specifically on our way to investigate something about Ghost pokemon, it probably worries you, seeing how easily Blue takes the lead.”

Jason bows his head. “Yes. You and I are similar in that navigating social hierarchy doesn’t come naturally to us, but Blue seems very adept at it, which confers on him automatic power in such situations.”

“Well, what if I do something that makes it clear I value your expertise on Ghost pokemon? I probably should have done more when I introduced you to make that clear.”

“That… might help, yes. I trust that he is a good leader, based on his experiences and your regard for him. I only worry that, once we arrive at the Tower, the mission might not have a clear solution or direction, and if Blue naturally steps up to guide us…”

“You want to make sure he doesn’t get distracted by other priorities. I get it.” He thinks of the goggles, and his own interest in testing them. “I’ll try not to divert the mission either, and speak up if someone else does.”

“Thank you, Red.”

“No problem, thanks for filling me in.” His attention is distracted by Maria, who’s standing not too far and glancing over at the two of them as she brushes her murkrow’s feathers. Behind her, Leaf is asking Jean about her kimono, and Blue is adjusting the straps on Soul.

“That girl, Maria,” Jason murmurs. “She’s a sensitive.”

“You can tell?” Red asks, surprised.

“Yes.” The medium raises his voice. “Would you like to join us?”

She seems surprised to be addressed, then nods and approaches as her pokemon flaps to the ground and begins to search the grass. “Hello.”

“Hi, Maria. Want to join us?”

“No, thank you. Grass stains.” She pats down the edges of her short cloak. “You seemed to be curious?” She’s looking at Jason.

“Yes, I’m sorry if it was discomforting. I didn’t realize you could sense me at first.”

“That’s alright, I became used to the feeling.”

“Ah, yes, I thought I recognized you. You’re one of the girls from the Casino.”

She ducks her head. “I am. That’s actually part of why I’m here.” She glances at Red, and smiles. “Red saved my life that night. I wanted to help repay him, if possible.”

Smile back. Red does so, not sure what his unpartitioned self knows that he doesn’t but trusting there’s a good reason for it. “All I did was warn you. Capturing their pokemon and keeping Glen alive were way more impressive.”

“Well, I’m glad you are here,” Jason says. “I believe you may have some untapped talent regarding Ghost pokemon.”

Her eyes widen. “How do you know?”

“Just a feeling. Like recognizing like, shall we say? I don’t know for sure, but am happy to work with you and discover it if so. Have you ever encountered a Ghost pokemon before?”

“No. That’s the other part of why I came. I was curious to experience something new.”

“Then tonight, after we arrive, you’ll meet my Ghost pokemon in a safe setting.” He gives a wry smile. “Assuming we do not encounter any after we arrive.”

Lavender Tower appears before the town itself is visible, a distant exclamation point against the horizon that gains color and definition until Red can count each story and make out the lightning rod above the domed roof. Its color fits the name of the town, but each story above the first is a slightly lighter shade than the last, so that it appears as if the whole thing were blending into the sky. They arrive at the outskirts as the sun is starting to descend, the trip concluding uneventfully; between the three psychics searching for threats, they were able to avoid any confrontation with wild pokemon along the way.

The town’s Trainer House is small, just three stories high and sharing its block with a trainer supply market. Their group draws a lot of stares, probably because of Blue’s arcanine, which pants for breath as Blue slides out of the saddle and to the ground, clothing and hair soaked through. He groans as he puts his hands on the back of his hips and stretches.

“That can’t have been comfortable,” Leaf remarks as the rest of them take out their container boxes and begin packing away their riding gear.

“It wasn’t,” he grumbles. “He kept me warm, but riding on pokemon is overrated.”

“Depends on the terrain, I’d say,” Jean points out. “Bikes are less effective in forests, for example, while arcanine can move through them much more quickly. You’re still trading comfort, but at least it’s for a reason.” She smiles. “Other than to look impressive, of course. Which you accomplished.”

Blue grins and starts brushing his pokemon’s fur. “Guess it wasn’t that bad.”

Soon they’re inside and registering for rooms. As Red waits in line, he takes his phone out to message his mom and let her know they arrived just as a young man with short dirty blond hair approaches. He’s wearing a pokebelt, but also the white coat of a researcher.

“Hello, Blue? Red?” He smiles, clearly recognizing them. “I’m Artem. I’ve been working with—”

“The unown research team,” Red says, and smiles. “I remember you from the forum. Nice to meet you! What are you doing here?”

“You too! I was nearby when your message about Lavender Tower went out, and decided to come investigate too. It’s actually quite fascinating what’s been happening—”

“Hold that thought.” Red psychically gets Jason’s attention, then waves him over. “Artem, this is Jason. He’s a medium studying under Leader Sabrina, and is actually our team leader in the investigation. Jason, Artem got here before us and has apparently already noticed something.”

Jason smiles at Red, then bows to Artem. “Thank you for joining us. What did you find? Have the increased amount of Ghosts in the area become noticeable?”

“Ah, no, actually quite the opposite!” Artem belatedly bows back, hands fidgeting in the pockets of his coat and smiling excitedly as he looks back and forth between them. “It seems the Ghosts in Lavender Tower have largely disappeared!”

Book Reviews

On the (actual) Origin of Species


I’m pretty happy with my pokemon fanfic’s name, but I didn’t just pick it because it sounds cool and has some thematic fit. I picked it because Darwin’s book means something very special to me. This isn’t going to be a detailed review of the book’s contents itself, but rather why I think it’s so much more important than most people realize.

161 years ago today, Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, a book that literally changed the way we humans understood ourselves, and our place in the world around us. It  For those that haven’t read it, haven’t seen Darwin’s thoughts in their original form back when this was the cutting edge of science rather than taken for granted by all but the most ignorant, it may be hard to appreciate just how important this book was. Ironically enough, atheists and agnostics may especially underestimate the importance of it, thinking it simply the root of our understanding of evolution. Most don’t realize that if it hadn’t been written, they may not be skeptics at all.

Because skepticism doesn’t come easy to people, and our brains are pattern-matching machines. Before Darwin, the vast majority of the irreligious were, at the very least, deistic or spiritualists. Great thinkers, rationalists, and philosophers may have recognized the absurdities and contradictions of the theistic religions, but surely, they thought, something supernatural existed. How else to account for the origin of the universe? Or the miracle of life’s variety, including us, in our apparent superiority over the lesser creatures of the world?

Edwin Hubble answered the first, and Charles Darwin the second. They gave us something precious: the ability to conceptualize a world, a universe, a cosmos, as just what it is. A reality that explains itself, to those willing to put in the hard work of studying it, so that even in our immense ignorance, we are still capable of distinguishing the map from the territory.

Even today, as widespread as evolutionary acceptance is, while many religions become more progressive and attempt to integrate it into their worldview, there persists a stumble at the finish line, an insistence of some supernatural intervention on the part of humans, thus setting us intrinsically apart from the rest of naturally evolved life. This is done to preserve our sense of universal importance, our God-granted cosmic purpose, or to preserve specific fundamental aspects of the faith, such as “original sin.” But all it reveals is just how powerful this truth is, that it continues to make otherwise intelligent and accepting people flinch and ignore parts of it, often without even realizing that they’re doing it, or why it matters. Imagine trying to have such a difficult thought, in the world before anyone knew better?

Charles Darwin was one of the most important figures in human history. Like all scientific findings, his discovery would have been made by someone else if he hadn’t (and very nearly was), but he had not just the intelligence to discover the true mechanism of evolution, but also the courage to take what he saw as truth, and put his name on it, and invite the ridicule, scorn, and disbelief that it received. Almost all of modern medicine, our understanding of life’s diversity and origins, and the fundamental unity of our species and connection to the rest of the planet’s life, comes from his discoveries.

For that, I thank him, and I invite you all to as well.

As an addendum, for people who might wonder about Alfred Wallace not being mentioned despite his great contributions, I’ll quote this informative article:

Darwin always put the emphasis on selection acting on individuals whereas Wallace apparently thought selection acted on groups or species. That selection acts on the individual, due to competition between individuals of the same species, is one of the key points in Darwin’s theory. Whether selection acted for “the good of the group” or on individuals was debated for a long time. Now, however, it is generally accepted that Darwin was right and that selection acts primarily on individuals.

Another apparent difference is that Darwin emphasized competition within populations as the driving force for evolution, whereas Wallace put more emphasis on the species meeting the demands of a change in their environment. Wallace also seemingly disagreed with many of the terms Darwin coined. For example Wallace never appreciated the analogy between evolution and artificial selection which was one of Darwin’s key insights and the source of the term Natural Selection. Wallace even scored out natural selection from his copy of On the Origin of Species and wrote ‘survival of the fittest’ in its place.

In later years the two men differed on other points, for example Darwin invoked other processes than natural selection to explain the evolution of particular characteristics. One of Darwin’s other key theories is sexual selection, which he viewed as an incredibly important process. Wallace however thought its effects were negligible and put more emphasis on natural selection. In his book Darwinism Wallace proposed alternative explanations to many of Darwin’s examples of sexual selection. In the 1970s sexual selection received increased attention from biologists after a long period of being largely forgotten. Work since then has shown that Darwin was right; sexual selection is a key factor in the evolution of many traits.

Darwin and Wallace also disagreed on human evolution. For Darwin, all aspects of humans, including the emotions, conscious mind and intelligence could be explained by natural or sexual selection. By the late 1860s Wallace had become a Spiritualist, and perhaps linked to this, began to reject evolutionary explanations of human intelligence and abilities invoking ‘the unseen universe of Spirit’. This, he claimed, had intervened in the normal run of natural selection three times; at the creation of life, the introduction of consciousness, and the generation of man’s mental capacities.

Later in his life Wallace also believed in teleology; the idea that the development of the universe has had a direction and that direction is towards the perfection of man. There are suggestions that Wallace also applied his teleology to evolution. Darwin was clearly a bit perplexed by his former ally’s new views and at one point wrote to Wallace pleading with him not to kill ‘our baby’.

So yeah. In my view, while Wallace formed a similar theory, he was far less accurate in his specifics, and had far less data to prove his assertions. It’s not enough in science to be right but for the wrong reasons, and we should not lightly dismiss the spiritualist and supernatural insistence Wallace held onto when comparing which of the two great scientists was able to find a better approximation of truth.