A Little Living

[spectre]

“Really, the only way through to that place with a gym—”

“Melka.”

“—Melka, is through these, uh, those caves?”

“Marook.”

“Marook…” Calista chewed her lip and eyed Elliot, waiting for more in-depth responses. He had barely paid attention to her for an hour. He’d been reading a guidebook for a while, but now had one leg propped over another and was reading a well-thumbed copy of White Fang; a novel she remembered from high school was about a Lycanroc. The truck beneath them shuddered and bumped over potholes.

She was ping-ponging between being amused and annoyed by the newfound dynamic in their little group. Elliot was obviously intelligent, but he appeared to suddenly want the world to know it, now that Lyla had joined their journey out of Cascadia. Every now and then, Elliot would wiggle his propped ankle, glance around, and then make some kind of comment about the text. A bark of a laugh, a shake of his head … just something to remind everyone that he was engaging intellectually.

She sucked in a deep breath of fresh summer air, but the attempt at relaxation backfired when a jolt of rib pain hammered through her core. Elliot let out a loud scoff, and shook his head as he turned the page.

“Enjoying that, are you?” Calista asked pointedly. Elliot had the decency to look sheepish when he caught her gaze and she raised her eyebrows.

“It’s … yeah.”

Lyla proved his attempts at … whatever he was doing … had gone unnoticed anyway, when she jabbed her finger over the top of the truck bed they all occupied, and gasped.

“Mareep!” she squealed. The fields rushed past them, flashes of fluffy white and sparks of yellow as the huge herds of pokemon grazed under the bright, powerful midday sun.

Calista pulled her lips inside her mouth to keep from smiling when Elliot looked over at Lyla, all the disappointment obvious in his face. Her beautiful honey-blonde hair was tied up tight on top of her head, and she had wrapped a silk red and white scarf around it to combat wind-hair. The red colour on her lips and her pale skin was set off to an almost alarming level, and it was like sharing a space with a movie star.

Not that she felt jealous, necessarily … but it did feel a little unfair. Calista didn’t think of herself as ugly. She was incredibly physically fit, for one, and had a symmetrical face and healthy, clean skin and hair. But she exerted herself too much to use more makeup than light mascara and liner at the beginning of the day, and chapstick didn’t count.

The scarf idea hadn’t occurred to her, so she had tied her hair up tight in a clip, but the excess she couldn’t control had been whipping up in the humidity so intensely that her hair was basically a frizzy cloud sticking out almost horizontally by her face. When Lyla had cried ‘Mareep!’ she might as well have been talking about her.

“No, it’s not the only way to get there,” Elliot said, a minute slow. Occasionally he would set down his novel and pick up a little map and guidebook he had of this area of northern Godai. “We could go around, but it looks like it’s faster through, and it isn’t really dangerous if we have pokemon with us.”

Calista nodded, and settled back in the truck bed to watch the blue sky and green-yellow fields whoosh by. She didn’t quite feel the wonder that was written all over Lyla’s face, but she felt pretty happy, and very lucky, to be there. Even on the more rickety parts of the journey.

It was a ranch hand — ‘Jo’s the name. If you ever need to spell it, there ain’t no ‘e’.’ — who had agreed enthusiastically to ferry Lyla around, and had only grinned harder when Calista joined them. Which was nice. But his face had absolutely fallen when Elliot joined to make four; none of them had missed that. But he didn’t rescind his offer, so off they went, clambering into the back instead of all squeezing into the seats inside. He had mentioned he didn’t have AC inside the vehicle, and it was nicer to be outside with the breeze. But it was probably not what Jo had been expecting.

Why would they ever have needed to spell his name?

But when they all piled out, he looked super grumpy, his arm dipped outside of his open window, and twisted lips to give off a look of total disinterest. So Lyla leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek. She lingered, perhaps whispering something into his ear. Calista propped her sunglasses on top of her messy hair and squinted at the other girl as the truck drove off.

“What did you say?”

Lyla just winked, and did a little twirl as she started to walk away. Her stylishly wrinkled grey linen skirt flew outward as she did, and Elliot dragged his tongue across his lower lip, stuffed his books in his backpack, and strode faster to get ahead of them both.

“It’s this way,” he announced, in a voice that may have been slightly deeper than usual.

Calista slid her sunglasses back down her nose, and looked around. The road from Cascadia to Melka was pretty well-worn, but since he had driven down some side paths toward the cave structure, the path was mostly gravel right where they were, and sloping downward for a while before making a sharp upward swing into the mountains.

Up as high as they were already, the wind whipped from the direction of the lake, which was maybe fifteen miles away and below — and just about obscured by jagged rock and an upward sloping hill, which would also have led back to the main road.

Calista turned back down towards the winding path that would shortly lead to one of the largest entrances to the cave system, and squinted. Noticing her hesitation, the other two turned and, shielding their eyes, stared back up at her.

“Well?” Lyla called up.

“Are you sure about this?” Calista responded, resting her hands on her hips. “I mean, we could just hitchhike the rest of the way. Along the roads.”

Elliot gestured to the guidebook excitedly and opened his mouth, but Lyla took a step and laid a hand on his arm, smiling warmly over at him. They were almost exactly the same height when Lyla wore those totally-inappropriate-for-caving sandals. “Live a little,” she said, raising her voice above the whistle of wind through the rock tunnels just beyond.

Live a little. Not a sentiment she had considered before. Not anything that had ever been suggested to her.

She’d lived for several years. The appropriate amount, considering when she was born and the date it was now. Now Calista understood idioms, okay, but this one for some reason kind of hit her in the gut. How did you know to what degree you’ve been actively living your own life? At the other end of it all, would she believe her life was one she had completely and utterly … lived?

For the eightieth time, her Xtransceiver rang. Calista glanced down at the screen, saw who was calling, and rejected the call. She wanted the caller to know they were rejected, not for it to ring out. There would be little to no reception inside the caves, so it would seem as though she had turned off her devices. Good.

“Fine, let’s do it.”

She stepped carefully down off the main gravel path, and then hopped from one flat rock to one jagged rock, making a show of balancing on one boot tip. Then, smiling, she hopped onto the winding path in front of them, and did a little bow. Her friends snorted and clapped politely, and they began their trudging descent. They left the sun behind, the humidity, the buildings and people and roads, and — finally — they came upon a gigantic opening in the rock wall. The trodden path told the stories of a thousand people who had made their way, one after another, right inside.

An affixed, but wonky, large wooden sign said ‘Welcome to Marook Caves’, but it didn’t necessarily look like a permanent fixture. They had to rummage around in their things to find more clothing. Even Lyla had to find a thick woollen sweater and tie it tight around her waist. Inside, wind howled, and creatures chattered. Calista put away her sunglasses, finding the sudden glow of light on pale rock to be almost blinding, and wrapped herself in her lightweight cold-weather jacket. She allowed herself one single shudder.

“What are you waiting for?” she teased, as the other two stood, silent, to take in the toothy, open maw of the so-called frozen caverns. “Are we going to do a little living, or what?”

[spectre]

The caves were cold, and some of the terrain was tricky. Calista found herself doing rough mental calorie math while the others chattered and explored and squealed at the dimly lit sights. Parts of the caves out here near the entrance had large cracks that led outside, letting in not only blinding white sun that reflected off the snow piles, but also freezing cold air.

“We’ll need to stop soon,” she said, alarmed at how loudly her voice echoed in the relatively large stone passageway. Elliot looked over at her, questioning, and she nodded ahead. “A little way up there, away from the outside air, we should stop and warm up and eat something. We have a long way to go.”

“Exactly, so shouldn’t we power through?” Lyla asked, flicking her gaze to Elliot as if asking him to back her up. Calista felt suddenly uneasy about their trio dynamic. With three of them, she realised, the balance had the potential to totally mess up. They hadn’t had a single issue so far, but if they did? It didn’t seem unlikely that Elliot would side with Lyla, from the way he looked at her, and Calista wasn’t sure she’d appreciate that.

“We can, but we don’t want to risk being in a tricky situation and not at full, you know, strength,” Calista tried to explain. “I know we’re all probably not hungry, but a lot of that’s adrenaline. We could crash, and in a frozen mountainside isn’t the best place for a hypoglycaemic episode.”

Lyla let out a huff of air that Calista could briefly see, and they both mumbled an agreement. She huddled into herself a little, wrapping her arms around herself to fight away the cold. It wasn’t in her nature to tell people what to do, but she believed what she was saying was the best course of action.

At least they were going to listen to her, she told herself. They were just excited to make good time.

The caves were cold, and dark, but they were far from impossible to navigate, which had been a very real possibility. Calista had a makeshift torch ready for Angel to light up, but there were lights here and there in the caves to guide tourists through, which was unexpected. She was considering leaving the torch behind, but had instead found a way to strap it to her backpack. Angel was annoyed by the swinging stick, but Calista had sternly reprimanded her when she had tried to light it ablaze while it was tied to her back. So instead the Salandit had taken her second-favourite place, on Calista’s shoulder with her little claw clutching at her trainer’s ear.

“Ah. Can I see the map?” Elliot asked after a few more minutes, curving in front of the girls and stopping with his hands on his hips. There was a significant fork. One led sharply to the left, the other, sharply to the right. He looked from Calista to Lyla. “Who has the map?”

Confused why Lyla wasn’t offering the information, Calista spoke up instead. “Lyla had it last.”

“Yeah, I have it,” the other girl said, licking her lips in the pale light. Her head turned right, but her arm pointed left. “It’s this way.”

“Can I see?” Elliot asked.

Lyla shook her head, irritated. “I said it’s this way. You don’t need to confirm everything I say…”

It was a habit Elliot seemed to have; Calista wasn’t going to argue that. He seemed like he’d heard it before, too, because though his brow creased, he said nothing and followed her directions. Lyla visibly swallowed before confidently following him.

To the right, Calista could hear wind whistling like fingertips on a wine glass. She wasn’t familiar with caves or caving in the slightest, but logic dictated that if she couldn’t hear wind to the left, left meant they were headed deeper into the mountain. Whether that was a good thing or a bad thing, she had no idea.

She followed after her friends.

The path got progressively darker, but neon spots of light remained few and far between, indicating that wherever they were, they probably weren’t way, way off track. Calista glanced over at Lyla’s confident strides as they passed by the next light source, wondering if she could catch a glimpse of concern on the girl’s face, but saw nothing but determination.

“Here, right?” Calista offered when they reached another branch. The left path was wide and open and led up to a flat, mostly-lit cavern. The right path wound downwards and seemed to get progressively narrower. She pointed left, and looked questioningly to Lyla as though she would get the final say. Really, though, she was convinced Lyla was lost, and wasn’t going to admit it. At least this way, Calista could secretly lead the way without starting an argument.

“Uh huh, that’s right,” Lyla said without missing a beat, hurrying forward to hug her sweater close and lead the way up the slope to the cavern. She rested her hands on her hips and looked out at the open space, about the size of a ballroom, lined with arched rock walls, a swirling monotone of fuzzy white frost and black ice.

“Careful, it looks slippery,” Calista said, clutching Lyla’s arm as they navigated carefully across the stony ground. “Are you wearing wedges?” She paused to take in her friend’s high heels. Lyla tapped the ground with the tip of her toe to show them off.

“I also have these in burgundy, but I didn’t have space to pack them.”

Calista tilted her head to get a better look. “Oh, I bet those were—”

“Ladies,” Elliot interrupted, and nodded across the cavern. “That looks promising. And I don’t see any pokemon around. Should we stop here for a minute?”

Glad he was in agreement with her, Calista found a flat-looking rock that wasn’t icy, though it was still ice-cold to the touch, and settled onto it. “I think we’re just over a mile in. We can eat a snack and adjust to the cold.”

Lyla’s face fell from happy to talk about her attire to a little disappointed, then annoyed … then went full circle again into a slight smile as she sat down cross-legged on the rock beside them. “They weren’t kidding when they said this place was cold, right?” she said lightly. Calista handed her a granola bar and grinned.

“No way. It’s really almost worse than I expected.” Elliot hugged his legs and let out an involuntary shudder.

“It’s partly because we travelled up higher pretty quickly from warm to cold in a single day,” Calista said, trying to cheer them up. “We won’t feel it as much in a minute.” She shivered too, tapping her boot heel on the ground to keep her legs moving.

Elliot laid out a couple of his finds on a t-shirt on the rock in between them. They all turned and sat, legs under them, facing the centre of the rock, and each other, and took the time to huddle under spare blankets and jackets while they nibbled snacks in silence.

After they’d eaten, and realised they had been hungry after all, Calista took the time to sort through her backpack and make certain things more accessible, like Angel’s fire type pokechow. It was a brand name packet of hard little kibbles that her Salandit seemed to like more than the few others they’d tried.

“Uh,” Calista corrected, snatching away the food just as Angel chomped down onto the air with an audible ‘snap’. “No. Gentle.” She offered it again, and Angel’s jaw opened impossibly wide, eyes flashing. Calista knew what was coming and pulled her hand away again. “Gentle!” The lizard shuffled, then span a circle on all four feet, and hunkered back onto her haunches and held out long black fingers.

“Awww!” Lyla cried, holding her hands to her heart. Angel tilted her head backwards, resting it against her own back to blink at Lyla, who giggled. “Give her the food!”

“Not until she takes it gently,” Calista said with a tut. “No tricks, just gentle.” She closed the kibble in her fist and held it out. Angel nudged it and tasted the air around her fist with her flicking tongue, swatted it with her tiny hands, and then Calista opened her hand. She snapped her jaws excitedly, and Calista closed her fist again. “Gentle,” she reminded. This time when she opened her fist, Angel glanced up at her and took the kibble with a soft mouth, skittering away to hide behind Lyla’s leg and crunch on it. Calista scattered the rest of the food pieces on the ground beside the rock for the Salandit, wiped her palm on her leg, and began repacking her bag.

“Which way, Ly?” Elliot asked, packing away the rest of his own stuff sans a second hoodie. Lyla swallowed.

“Onward,” she said, looking carefully at the ground to avoid kicking Angel as she rose to her feet. “You’re right. I think I’m warmer now.”

“But then where, do you know? Which direction are we facing? We should be going towards the west, I think,” Elliot said, flipping through his guidebook. “This thing just has facts about the caves, instead of an actual map.” He glanced up. “Did you guys know there are Avalugg down on the lower levels, and they can sometimes be so aggressive with each other that they had to close off those pathways to people?”

Calista glanced over at Lyla, who actually visibly paled. She should say something, right? She should mention that the map was obviously lost? Calista looked away … she was annoyed, but she didn’t want to initiate confrontation. Lyla would beat her in any argument, she could already tell.

Heart beating harder just from the thought of speaking up, Calista walked on, casually steering her friends away from a patch of black ice, and then pausing at it. She slipped off her backpack and set Angel down on the safe ground, then placed her boot on the flat, slick ice, and kicked off. She squealed at the speed she instantly hit, lifting up onto her toe, and spinning once before losing total control of her leg and landing hard on her butt with a shriek.

“Oh, wow, that was almost really cool!” Lyla cried over, nudging at the ice with her toe, and then backing away when her foot slid easily. “I would break my ankle.”

“Can you make it back?” Elliot laughed.

Calista wobbled when she pushed herself to her feet, and smiled, showcasing the light flash of blood on her lower lip. “I bit my lip,” she announced. “I’m living a little. Did you see?”

“Don’t die,” Lyla said, pacing left and right without stepping onto the ice. “That isn’t what I meant.”

“Angel, melt me a path.” The Salandit stepped forward, tilting her head. “I’ll give you more kibble! Ember and come here. That’s right.” Angel snorted yellow flames and waddled forwards. “Yeah! Ember and come here. Come on, Angel.”

Angel fell into a scamper, flames shooting from her only partially open mouth and crackling and hissing against the icy ground. Calista scooped her up and kissed her between the eyes before she knew what she was doing. But Angel didn’t protest, so she smiled and marched back to her friends.

“Good Angel!” Lyla praised, tickling her behind the black spines on her neck until it twitched happily. “She’s a cutie.”

“She’s getting there,” Calista muttered, letting the fire lizard climb up onto her shoulder to look at the world from up high. “Before, I think she—”

“Oh my GOD.”

Calista and Elliot looked at their companion with alarm, noticing that Lyla had her arm out, pointing, and her mouth wide open as she stared at a rock beside them.

“What— Oh, wow!” Elliot joined her, crouching down. “Hey, buddy! Aww, look, Callie.”

“What??” Calista stepped forward just in time to see a huddled, crouching Vulpix, fur on end and squinting up at them with huge eyes from behind a rock. Whatever magical spell had come over her friends hit her like a train too. “AwwwwWW LOOK!” she shrieked, pointing at the tiny white fox as if she had found it all by herself.

“Sshhh!!” Lyla swatted at her arm and all three of them leaned slowly in to get a better look.

“It’s tiny. Are they all that small?”

“No, I think it’s not very grown. Aww, it’s shivering.”

“Can’t be cold. It’s scared.”

Calista rummaged into her bag for the special treats she kept for when Angel was acting really out of control. Right now, the lizard was trembling on her shoulder. Almost without thinking, Calista got her attention away from the Vulpix, and then when she stopped vibrating with the need to attack, Calista slipped a delicious MooMoo jerky piece into her lizard mouth.

Then she handed Angel to Elliot, and knelt down about four feet away from the Vulpix, and unfurled her fingers to reveal the sizeable rest of the treat. The Vulpix had watched the whole thing go down, and hadn’t moved away. The presence of Angel, aggressively as she was staring, was maybe piquing its curiosity. It looked down at Calista’s hand, and then blinked up at her.

“Yeah,” she said in as soothing a voice as she could muster. “It’s food. Fooooood.”

Lyla crouched beside her, and helped herself to the jerky from Calista’s hand, holding it out further and shaking it slowly from side to side.

“It’s not…” Calista began, but the Vulpix crept forward an inch, watching it.

“Good baby! Are you hungry? Lost your mama?” Lyla tossed a look around her. “Man, I hope we don’t run into an angry Ninetales.”

“Ice Ninetales,” Elliot said from behind them, sounding excited. “How cool are those things? I’ve always wanted to see one.”

Lyla looked backwards and up at him. “Not be killed by one, though.”

“Good point … it’s cute as actual fuck, but should we leave it alone?”

“Nooo,” the girls whined, but Calista sighed and got back up. As soon as she did, the Vulpix braved the next couple of steps and very, very gently pulled on the jerky with its teeth. Lyla held onto it where Calista would have let it go instantly, and the Vulpix remained there, slowly tearing off pieces and eating only inches away from her.

With her other hand, Lyla reached out and petted it on the head, making quiet faux-sobbing noises as she did so. “Good Vulpix,” she said, and then dared to reach out with both hands to pick it up. The Vulpix backed up, looked up at her for a moment longer, and then turned tails and scampered away.

“Dammit,” Lyla muttered, and got to her feet, looking genuinely disappointed. She hugged herself, rubbing the goosebumps from her skin.

“You want a pokemon, you think?” Elliot asked, beginning their walk again.

“I really did when I was a kid,” Lyla said, sticking her hands in her big sweater pockets and following behind him. “I mean, like everyone. But we didn’t have a lot of space, and my parents were always at work. It would have been neglected at home, and they refused to do that.”

“Then when you left home?” Elliot had a knack for easing information out of people. Calista was more than happy to follow behind and listen. Now that they’d confirmed there were wild pokemon here, though, she was also interested in carefully looking around.

“Yeah, when I left home I toyed with it a while. But I worked full-time in retail, then in an office, and I came close to thinking about it a few times, but I always just figured I didn’t have the need or the time to actually train it. And pokemon don’t wanna stay weak forever, do they? It always just felt really mean.” Her face lit up. “But now? Yeah, I think I’d enjoy it. Not the gym challenge or anything like that, but just having one or two pokemon for company until I figure out my plan.”

“What is your plan?”

Lyla, for a moment, looked as lost as they actually were. “I’d wanted to leave the city for a while. But I fell into that relationship. I don’t have a lot of skills.” She turned to Calista. “I was gonna mostly stick around you guys and figure something out. I have an aunt somewhere near Vlostik who I was quite close to before we moved. I think I have a couple of older cousins in Melka I’m planning on messaging when we get in.” She let out a huff of a sigh. “I guess I didn’t want to admit this yet, but I have no idea.”

“I was pretty much just planning on getting a gym badge and then heading back to Cascadia,” Elliot said, “but then that whole thing happened, and … I dunno if I’ll feel safe there.” They both looked at Calista, who raised her eyebrows.

“You want to know my plan?” she asked, surprised.

“Well,” Lyla said, “yeah. You always seem to know what you’re doing.”

Calista let out a snort so loud it echoed in the caves. “You don’t seem to understand how lost I am. My plan? Compared to yours, it’s nothing. I have no plan. I just …” She trailed off, suddenly embarrassed at how true it was. “I was planning on going to the Safari Zone, and finding a Ponyta to raise. The only link I had to my mother was her Rapidash, and she died, so I left home. I was … it sounds so stupid when I say it out loud. Wow.”

“No,” Lyla said, resting her hand on Calista’s shoulder. “Not stupid.”

Elliot smirked over his shoulder at them. “It’s a little stupid.”

“Elliot!” Lyla swatted him.

“No, I’m not being mean. If you want to get closer to your mother, raising a Ponyta is a pretty … literal way to go about it. You know? Like, what did she stand for? What did she love? You should try to give back to the world something that she would have wanted to give if she still had the chance. Catching a Ponyta?” He shook his head, once again seeming purely thoughtful, and not cruel. It was something she was getting more and more used to about him; how almost-offensive he could be. “I don’t think that’s going to make you feel any kind of closure.”

She swallowed the knot in her throat. “Closure?”

There was a soft silence in the caves as the tone suddenly shifted and everyone in the trio tried to figure out where to go from here.

“I think what he means is—”

Calista cut her off. “I don’t want closure from the death of my mother, Elliot. She’s not an ex.” Anger gripped her chest the more she spoke. Aimed not just at him. At everything. At her lack of a plan. At her lack of real parents. “She’s not some girl who blew me off in high school. She’s … she was … she is … my mother.” She shook her head and the loose pale waves obstructed her peripheral vision, boxing her in as they trudged through icy tunnels.

“Let’s not start fights, okay?” Lyla said softly. And Calista felt only a dull hum of irritation at that dismissal -- until she realised she was looking at her and not Elliot. She blinked and stopped walking. With a couple of slippery stomps, the others stopped too.

“Did you just tell me not to start fights?” she asked slowly. “Elliot just told me my plan to feel like I’m honouring my dead mother in some tiny way was stupid.” This wasn’t the angle she wanted to come from when expressing her feelings, but knowing that just made her madder, and she doubled down. She just had to express it all, now, somehow. “I asked him to back off, and you’re asking me not to start a fight? You don’t know me. You have no reason to think I’m some kind of fight-starter. Why defend him from me? He can take care of himself.”

Lyla’s face twitched in irritation, and she just wobbled her head back and forth as if shaking off some kind of onslaught. “Okay…” she said, and turned around to keep walking.

Okay…

Now Calista was seething.

“Wait,” she said low, and the sharp single syllable pinged off the walls, echoing several times in a rhythmic, fading loop. Lyla turned to face her, and Calista sucked in several deep breaths. “Lyla. Where’s the map?”

The other girl’s beautiful eyes went from wide to narrowed in a single frame of movement. “Let’s go,” she said. But she didn’t turn around.

“Guys. I’m sorry, Calista. Callie? I’m really, really sorry. I have this thing … this thing I do,” Elliot scrambled to say, but it wasn’t about him now. Maybe she had had this anger at the surface for years. Decades. It was a shame he had said something too blunt and let it out of her, but that was that. It was out. Elliot was still waving his arms around, talking. “... I think I just went to too much therapy as a kid. And I read. God, I read all day. It’s sad. I’m pathetic. I just say everything that pops into my head as I think it. Like, ‘Hey, you think your boyfriend doesn’t love you? Maybe you should stop telling him what he should and shouldn’t eat,’ you know? …”

“I said where’s the map, Lyla?”

Lyla lifted her arms, and slowly folded them across her chest. “Why are you asking?”

Calista swallowed, trying to control herself. “Nothing. Just lead the way.”

Elliot visibly deflated, actually bending down to put his hands on his knees. “Oh, man,” he breathed. “I thought … never mind.”

They continued walking. Lyla looked over at him. “What?”

“A cavern,” Calista pointed out. “Is this the right way? According to the map?”

“You know what? You can drop it,” Lyla snapped at her, powerwalking the rest of the way into the cavern. “Because yes.” She whirled around, lifting her arms. “This is exactly the right—”

The next noise that escaped her was a strangled scream as a white blur tackled her from behind, sending her crashing to her hands and knees.

[spectre]

Calista and Elliot stood, dumbfounded, staring in silence.

A bizarre roundish blob rolled serenely off of Lyla’s prone back and onto the icy ground, arfing with what seemed almost like laughter, and smacking its flippers together.

“What the fuck was that?” Lyla screamed, not daring to get back up, her voice hoarse.

“It’s just a Seel. Relax,” Elliot laughed, stepping forward to pat the pokemon on its round head. “It’s super friendly, guys.” He laughed again as the water type dragged its tongue across his hand, and then jerked it back, hissing through his teeth. “Ouch. What was that?”

“Is it alright?” Calista asked, leaving the black cloud of her mood behind her to come and kneel beside Elliot, noting that the back of his hand was already slightly red, and patted the Seel herself. It hopped back one foot, then balanced itself up on its tail, made an almost barking noise, and clapped three times.

“Oh … it wants food,” Lyla said, crawling over and leaning against the wall. The new cavern was larger, and the ground ahead looked difficult. Partly stone and rubble and rock debris, as if there had recently been some kind of disturbance, and partly strangely smooth, flat ice. It would be difficult to decide which would be easier to walk on.

“If it knows how to beg for food, it must be used to tourists,” Calista said. “So maybe we are on the right path after all.”

“... Yeah. Obviously,” Lyla said, dutifully digging around in her bag for snacks as if the pokemon were controlling her. The Seel continued to arf and clap, occasionally hopping around on its tail. Elliot had been right; it seemed really friendly. Calista licked her lips.

“We could try to catch it,” she realised aloud. “Catching a pokemon. I haven’t done that since Angel, and that was a fluke.” She glanced at the lizard peeking out from over her shoulder, eyes fixed unmoving, on the Seel. She wasn’t acting dominant or superior this time, which would probably only mean one thing: “Angel wouldn’t be able to defeat this pokemon in battle, though,” she guessed, nodding to Elliot. “But it doesn’t look like it’ll flee, so maybe you can challenge it.”

But Elliot shook his head. “I don’t … uh … have supplies yet. Medical supplies.” He flushed. “We left in such a rush. Anyway, I promised myself I wouldn’t get into any situations that weren’t one hundred percent necessary. Negi’s staying in his ball unless I need a bailout really bad.”

Calista tilted her head left and then right. A battle really might be the thing to get some of her feelings out. But there was a fairly compelling reason not to. Her pokemon seemed as though she wasn’t confident of a win. But on the other hand, Angel had not really outright won a battle. Maybe she was just learning to calm down and assess situations.

And she did have a medical kit; had purchased it from the Mart before they’d left.

“Hey, Seel,” she said, and the pokemon turned to look at her instantly, bouncing and barking and then lying and rolling around on the icy ground. It knew its species name, which was another sign it was really used to humans being friendly to it. “Angel, ready to battle?”

The Salandit crawled down her body, and snorted flames, clearing a path in the light frost so she could saunter closer to the pokemon as steam rose all around her. The Seel stopped playing and closed its mouth, regarding the fire type with her fins pressed together mid-clap.

“We’ll give you all the treats we can spare after this battle,” Calista promised. Seel stared up at her, and then down at Angel, and then ‘arf’ed twice, backing up five feet and lowering its head. “Looks like a yes, Angel! Let’s do this!”

SPOILER: Click to show

{Declaration}

Nickname: Angel Gender: Female Type: Poison/Fire Ability: Corrosion Health: Low EXP Gauge: (98/108) EXP Gained: 91 Level: 20	Attack: 22 Defense: 32 Sp. Attack: 64 (29%) Sp. Defense: 40 Speed: 62 (28%)
Moveset: 1. Scratch 1. Poison Gas 5. Ember 8. Sweet Scent 13. Dragon Rage 16. Smog	Held Item: None

SPOILER: Click to show

{Encounter}

Pokemon
Pokemon	PokeDex Info	Level	Stats	MoveSet
Seel SPOILER: Click to show {Personality}This Seel is something of a child at heart. She plays with the younger Pokemon, often by racing them. A whole day could be spent going sliding across the ice on her belly. She licks everyone she meets, but for some reason, bad things happen when she does! Nobody will play with her because her of her licking, what is a girl to do?	Gender: Female Type: Water Ability: Hydration Health: Intermediate	16	Total Stats: 176 Attack: 32 Defense: 42 (24%) Sp. Attack: 30 Sp. Defense: 42 (24%) Speed: 30	1. Headbutt 3. Growl 7. Water Sport 8. Encore 11. Icy Wind 12. Aqua Jet 16. Ice Shard Lick (Egg Move)

Watch out for water moves.” Damn … she couldn’t remember if Seel learned more ice moves or more water moves. Was it water and ice or just water? Or just ice? She really, really needed to do some more research. This was why Angel kept fainting.

The Seel reared back and flipped its tail up, clapping a couple of times, until water rained down in tiny droplets and the air felt muggy and wet, despite the freezing temperature. “What did it do?” she hissed to Elliot, who was fumbling to clean his glasses.

“Water Sport? Let’s move back.”

She took his advice and they stepped out of the range. Angel shook off, and let out an irritated chattering noise. Before Calista could order anything, the Salandit darted forward, letting the flames curl from her jaws and burn off the venom on her skin. The thickest purple cloud Calista had yet seen billowed from her black scales, spreading fast and deadly and capturing the Seel in its midst. When it cleared, Angel was hissing triumphantly and the Seel had its head bowed low as if already defeated.

Or not. It charged forward, the horn on its head almost glowing with aura energy. “Angel,” Calista yelled. “Dragon Rage!” It was as if the lizard pokemon had forgotten she had that move until it was mentioned. She opened her mouth wide and the force of the dragon type move exploding from her mouth forced her to slide backwards a couple of inches on the ice.

Caught up in the blue flames, the Seel only barely winced as it broke through and bucked Angel upwards with the sharp tip of its horn. The Salandit flew up, flipped, and then landed, slipping and sliding across one of the large flat icy portions of the ground. She scrambled and scrabbled for purchase but couldn’t seem to get back onto her feet.

“You have to calm down, Angel!” Calista called. “Just breathe and take it slow!”

“Oh, no,” Elliot said from beside her. “Aqua Jet?” That didn’t sound good. She turned and looked at him, and then quickly over to the Seel just in time to see it awash with what looked like ripples of pure, clear water cascading down to a point beneath its tail. The Seel launched forward two bounces, and then aura energy lifted it off the ground and it shot like a wet bullet towards the panicked Salandit.

“Angel, Ember!” Calista cried. She heard Elliot suck in a breath of uncertainty through his teeth beside her, but the fire type wasted no time in releasing a cascade of bright yellow flame from her wide open mouth in the Seel’s direction. It did nothing to slow down the foe -- it didn’t even burn off any of the water coating -- but it did serve to help Angel back onto her feet. Just in time to be hit with the all the force of a 200lb sack of moist rubber.

This time when she went careening back, she turned her head and used the ferocity of her Ember attack to slow her sliding. The Seel ran back, probably readying its next move. “Sweet Scent!” Calista tried, cupping her hand to carry her voice further.

Angel shook hard, huffing smoke as she concentrated, and then a faint white cloud lifted from the surface of her scales. Instead of venom, this time, the fast-moving cloud of gas would smell delicious and enticing to other pokemon. The Seel twitched and ceased its retreat, instead turning 180 and heading right back.

Angel snapped her jaws triumphantly and launched forward, just as the ice beneath her feet began to shiver and shake. The rocks at the edge of the ice patch shuddered, grinding against the separately moving surface.

“Uhh … what’s it using now?” she hissed to the others, but they all -- including the Seel, actually -- looked just as confused.

The ice crunched, rock at the edges of the patch crumbled and rained down as the chunk of flat terrain rose slowly, slowly, up into the air. Angel wobbled and teetered but remained safe as the Avalugg they had used as a battlefield awoke at the lick of the Ember, or the Sweet Scent, and let out a screeching roar. Calista winced, and covered her mouth with her hands. “Oh no, oh no, Angel! Run!”

The Seel slid around on the back of the Avalugg and clapped its hands, much more able to retain control, but looking a little worse for wear from the Dragon Rage plus the poisoning. Calista knew that whether or not she saw this through to the end, the Seel was going down soon anyway. It felt wrong to walk away from the battle and let it pass out without getting the chance to fight back any longer.

Clearly feeling the same way, the Seel tumbled almost elegantly down the slope of the Avalugg’s back as it reared back at a 45 degree angle. It rolled fast several times as it slid towards Angel, kicking up white shards of ice and then abruptly clapping its flippers, sending all of them tearing across the ice behemoth’s back towards a very confused Angel.

The Salandit was desperately searching for something to grab onto with her grippy hands and feet, seconds away from zipping off the back of the huge pokemon, when it landed on the ground again with all four feet, sending a crash that managed to reach all the way to Calista. The walls echoed and rumbled, and the ground did too. And she realised that the Avalugg hadn’t been alone.

Awoken by all the crashing and banging, every single other patch of flat ice on the torn up ground heaved itself up, shook itself off, sending debris flying everywhere, and let out a yawning roar of confusion and irritation.

“Angel, hang on!” Calista called through the cavern. The Avalugg holding the pokemon was stomping in their general direction, but none of them seemed bothered by the presence of the humans. In fact, if anything, they seemed to be eyeing each other more than anything else.

“End it,” Lyla was gasping. “Should you return her?”

Calista still felt the tingling at her skull; the fading white hot remains of that sudden anger. Anger at herself for having no idea who she was or where she was headed. And it was threatening to rush back into her, and fill her up, at any second.

“We’re not ready to give up,” she said through gritted teeth. “We’re going to win. Smog!”

This was a move they hadn’t quite mastered, but she had confidence that now was the time her pokemon would be able to pull it off. Her Poison Gas and her Ember were bigger and stronger than ever, and it would soon be time to replace them with more powerful moves.

The Salandit scrambled to the centre of the Avalugg’s mass, burning off her own venom as she went, and the Seel met her by spinning a merry circle and leaning in with a friendly lick. Calista had to squint to see that the tongue had actually almost rubbed her scales raw. It wasn’t so friendly after all, even though to her eyes it had looked as though the Seel were actually celebrating making a new friend.

The result was a mouthful of Smog, and the Seel backed away, blinking hard and looking a little upset now. It was wobbling on its feet. Either from the poison, or the fact that their Avalugg had taken a sharp turn and had crashed its hard head into the side of another Avalugg in the cavern. Ice shards sprayed, and remaining rock debris showered from their vast bodies. Lyla screamed and pulled the others back a few steps as she dashed away.

“Angel!” Calista cried. The other Avalugg took a second to turn to face the first, that housed their pokemon, and opened its mouth wide to let out an angry roar before slowly lowering its own head to crash against the first.

The pokemon on top wobbled dangerously, but continued to fight.

The Seel surrounded itself with that mystical water energy, and shot forward, and in Angel’s desperation to get away from the super effective attack, she scrambled backwards and lost balance. She flipped and slid, and managed to hold on to a hard notch of ice on the Avalugg’s jagged back.

The Seel bounced over, peering down at her foe with wide eyes. It reached out its tongue to Lick, realising perhaps that this was the opportunity to end it, but instead reached down and used its mouth to pull Angel back onto the ice surface again.

The next crash of a third roaring Avalugg forced them both to tumble off the side, crashing onto the floor and dashing to avoid being stomped on by icy feet.

“Angel!” Calista yelled. Couldn’t return her yet. Had to win. Had to win, just once, goddammit.

“Calista,” Lyla yelled over the roaring in response.

“Callie, you—”

“I’ve got this!” she snapped back, surprised by the shrill tone to her own voice. “Angel, dodge the feet, and Scratch!”

It seemed the smartest move just then. They were inches apart, darting left and right to avoid danger in unison. And if she used a special attack, she might hit an Avalugg and get its attention.

The Seel barked, turning to Angel and excitedly bouncing on its tail and clapping its flippers. Light shone, almost blindingly, for just a split second onto Angel, and she hissed and flicked her tail. They both tumbled out of the way of an Avalugg as it staggered back and crashed into the wall sending ice and rock raining down.

Shaking off that bright light, Angel automatically opened her mouth and forcefully burned off more venom, resulting in a thick, choking poisonous cloud like the Smog before. “I said Scratch!” Calista yelled pointlessly. The cloud lifted and consumed. The Seel keeled over beside the felled Avalugg, but there were still four more. Angel hissed and darted away from one as it charged, head lowered, at another of its kind.

“Return!” Calista cried, knowing her pokemon barely had another minute left in her. A bright glow surrounded her, and she shot a look at the downed Seel before she was reduced to energy and sucked into her ball. Calista clipped it to her belt, and realised she needed to catch her breath.

“What the hell do we do about that poor Seel?” Lyla called over the deafening noise of four remaining Avalugg fighting all around.

“Catch it,” Elliot yelled, leaning in. “You have to catch it. Pull it into a ball and get it out of there!”

“What if they step on the ball?” Lyla replied. He was stumped for a second.

“Dammit,” Calista said, and tightened her backpack straps. “I did this. I’ll fix it.”

Realising what was happening, Elliot reached out to grab her arm, but she twisted out of it. “No, are you crazy?” he shouted after her as she bowed her head low and dashed. “You won’t even be able to—”

But she didn’t hear what she wouldn’t be able to do. The Avalugg above her crashed head to head, raining ice mist, and she covered her head pointlessly and continued running. She tripped on debris, bending down to catch herself on a pile of broken rocks, and avoided the deep craters they had been resting in. She slid across the ground and glanced up at the knocked out Avalugg, half buried in the cavern wall, jaw slack, and swallowed hard as she turned to the fainted Seel. Its flippers were limp against its body, mouth open, tongue out. It was really quite sweet.

“You did great,” she told it, and fished out an empty pokeball. She spotted a narrow cavern just beyond, and mentally planned her journey from here to there. She had seconds, if she had correctly noted the attack times of the ice monsters. “In you get.” She bopped it with the ball, and the Seel was too sluggish to do anything about it. It was pulled inside, and Calista squeezed the ball hard, feeling it bounce and thrash against her fist. “Just wait three seconds!” she told it, and took off at a dead run. An Avalugg tossed a hunk of rock her way and she ducked down to the ground on her stomach as it exploded against a wall.

Then the weirdest noise, like a screaming TV set a nonexistent channel, and the air around her seemed to vibrate. She looked up, feeling winded from the fall, to see that all four Avalugg were facing another and charging up what looked to be a killer Ice Beam each in front of their mouths. She shoved herself to her feet, feeling dizzy with exertion, and rounded the corner into the tiny tunnel and out of danger.

“Guys, run!” she roared across the cavern. “I’ll meet you at the—”

The only sound that followed was the thundering of boulders from the walls, ceiling, floor, everywhere. She cried out and fled as the walls caved in, blocking out the only source of light.

Just then, the pokeball in her hand heated up and burst, and the Seel flopped out, writhing and blinking at her with confusion. It had escaped capture, but she had managed to get it out of harm’s way. “You’re alright,” she told it, breathless. Then she looked ahead of her at nothing but winding darkness. “We’re alright … maybe … dammit.”

SPOILER: Click to show

{Summary}Seel uses Water Sport. Fire’s power is weakened!
Angel uses Poison Gas. Seel is poisoned…
Seel uses Headbutt. (32 vs 32)
Angel uses Dragon Rage.
Seel uses Aqua Jet. It’s super effective! (32 vs 32)
Angel uses Ember, but it misses.
Angel uses Sweet Scent.
Seel uses Ice Shard. It’s not very effective...
Angel uses Smog. (64 vs 42)
Seel uses Lick.
Seel uses Aqua Jet, but it missed.
Seel uses Encore.
Angel uses Smog.
Seel is knocked out!

SPOILER: Click to show

{Notes}The Avalugg in this story I figured had survived untouched and thriving for countless years in this faraway section of the caves. Because of this … they are almost three times as big as they are in the Pokedex. This is purely for (delicious) flavour.

[spectre]

#4: A stranger comes into your camp late at night and asks if they may rest. They tell you of places you have never been, of the wonders to be found there. What parts of Godai interest your character most? Do they have dreams of Travel? (Wilds Only)

Calista took a second to work each of the two pokemon with her over with some of the potions she had grabbed from the city on her way out. The Seel wasn’t hers, no, but she couldn’t stand the thought of stranding it here in a cave-in, and she couldn’t carry it, so she was going to hope it would stick around until it found something it recognised. Then she could say goodbye.

“Not really sure what to do now,” she confessed to them. The Salandit glanced at the Seel, who just stared up at Calista, tongue lolling. Then Angel looked up at her too. She wasn’t starting a second fight now that her energy was restored -- it did look as though the fire type was calming down some.

“We’ll meet up with them at some point. I just have to find an exit to the caves, which shouldn’t be too hard…” She began to walk in the only direction available to her. It was a slight downward slope with a leftward tilt, but other than that superficial information … she had no idea where she was going.

If she just found an exit, any exit, she would be able to navigate much easier outside, and it would be far easier to find the main cave exit where her friends would be. Trying to navigate through these caves without a map would be close to impossible for anything other than searching for the outside world.

“Let me know if you catch any signs of an exit,” she told the pokemon, and they glanced up at her and continued moving along. The Seel was pretty cute, she conceded, and she was glad to have the company of more than one pokemon with her while she was alone, and lost.

How had she ever thought she would be able to do an entire journey on her own? It had been under a minute, and she was feeling cold, disorientated, unsure, lonely. And she worried about the others. They weren’t dumb, she knew that, but were they going to be alright?

A cavern opened out in front of her, and Calista had learned enough about these caves so far to know to be more wary than relieved. She blinked into the dim light until her eyes adjusted enough to get a sense of the wide open space. Approximately 80% of the ‘room’ was maybe five feet lower, connected to the entrance where she stood by a winding ramp that hugged the glistening ice/rock wall. She carefully took a couple of steps toward the edge of the higher level, only several feet away from the entrance, and separated from the ground by a vertical jagged drop. She’d have to carefully descend the ramp, which was fine. It looked almost manmade, if abandoned for quite some time. Maybe this had once been a part of a tour path, now shut off?

That thought gave her mixed feelings. Once a sanctioned path through the caves? Yes, that was ideal; it meant there were likely no imminent natural disasters, right? But now abandoned? Either it was normal, and they alternated paths every year or so to ensure humans didn’t destroy the natural ecosystem of that part of the caves, or … something had taken it over; something really bad had happened, and it was no longer considered safe enough to pass through.

It did, at least, mean that the pathway flickered to life with motion sensing neon lights when Calista got close to the near wall. She sucked in a breath and decided to just go for it. She headed to the slope and carefully, quietly, stepped down it without losing her feet from underneath her. After a moment, she glanced over her shoulder and gestured for the pokemon to follow her, but the Seel and Salandit stayed at the top of the slope, staring off at the far corner of the cavern below, silent and unmoving.

“Oh, crap,” Calista muttered when she reached the bottom and realised something bad was about to happen.

In around a five foot radius from her, the rock crumbled and cracked, spilling dust into the air, and the flat icy surface she stood on slowly and shakily began to rise into the air. Immediately, she crouched and lowered her centre of gravity as the biggest Avalugg yet cracked and stretched into its full height, and let out a low, keening bellow. At first it seemed to echo off the cavern walls, but then Calista saw several other shapes arise, rocks and debris tumbling downwards in a whooshing avalanche of deafening sound, and let out twin harmonising bellows to match the first.

“Oh, really, crap,” she added, just for herself. The Avalugg lurched and pulled itself out of the shallow hole it had made its home, and Calista tried to hang on to a jagged icy piece of its back while the creature yawned out an angry cry and smacked its huge, flat head into that of another of its species.

The juddering whiplash did more to her than she would have imagined, and Calista slid almost instantly right off the thing’s flat back, at the last possible second using her hands and feet to spring up and landing haphazardly half-on half-off another Avalugg.

“Sorry!” she gasped, and pushed herself higher. There were four exits at the other end of the cavern, and she could potentially reach them if she ran like crazy. But the pokemon…

Recalling Angel would require staying still and momentarily focusing on retrieving the ball from her backpack side pocket, aiming, and shooting. The Seel wouldn’t be pulled into any ball, and she would feel so guilty about leaving it in this room. “Come on!” she had to yell to them.

The Seel nudged Angel with its cold nose, making the lizard jump, but to her surprise they scampered together down the winding slope, and before they hit the bottom, Angel leapt from several feet up onto the back of an Avalugg.

By now, the pokemon were used to this method of transportation, and with more grace and style than she herself could muster, they went about travelling from back to back until they reached her. That was good -- they could all take care of themselves.

“Let’s get out of here,” she said. “Come!”

Calista slipped and slid until she got to the edge of the icy surface, and then mostly tripped and landed on one much lower to the ground. It was an easy jump. So easy that she got confident and tried to fully stand straight, and when it stirred beneath her she lost her footing and fell to her butt, then tumbled to the cracked and broken terrain that had once housed them all.

This was way, way more dangerous than trying to skip across them like stepping stones, and she cursed.

The only thing to do was run.

She bowed her head, lifting her arms to create a pretty useless kind of halo around her precious skull, and took off at a charge. To her left, an Avalugg began to charge, but another met it side-on with a crashing boom, and they both tumbled beside her. To her right, one reared up and bellowed deafeningly, cycling its stubby front legs, but before they slammed down on her, the sweet Seel leapt from its back and shot a beam of swirling energy into its face. Disorientated but not hurt, the icy behemoth reared higher and let out a roar, and Calista grabbed the Seel’s flipper and pulled it onward just as it crashed down a second later.

They reached one of the four exits, with no clue which one was best, and Calista turned around to find Angel just in time to see the Salandit flying through the air towards her. She caught her in her arms, taking a hard step backwards to take some of the momentum, and sucked in a winded breath. Then she pulled the lizard in for a tight hug.

“I’m not gonna say we made it,” she told them, “because I have no idea where we’re going. And it doesn’t look like the right way.” They both looked up at her, and she hugged Angel tighter. The fire type was warm. They didn’t know what she was saying, but she was comforted by speaking aloud.

The first thing she saw after ducking through the archway leading to yet another winding tunnel was a sign.

KEEP OUT!!!
Wild Avalugg battleground
Do NOT Stray From Your TOURGROUP!!

Calista tilted her head at the grammar choices a split second before the meaning flitted into her consciousness. Aha. She let out a huff. They were so incredibly lost that they appeared to have entered the forbidden areas of the cave from the opposite side. The fact that there was signage where Calista was now only proved something she hadn’t even wanted to consider. Her friends were probably in a much worse position than her. Lyla and Elliot were likely thoroughly lost.


[spectre]

Calista couldn’t help but feel angry, and then angrier still that she also felt frightened for them. Lyla; this was all her fault. Was Lyla really so proud that she had led them into this much danger? They could genuinely die if they wandered too far and too low down. Not only would there be more and more powerful pokemon, but there would be less and less light. And she had heard warnings about not only wild pokemon warring in the caves, but also incredibly poor air quality in some caverns and pathways. The kind of air quality that had hikers fall asleep and forget to wake up.

She took a second to roll her eyes up to the ceiling; a gesture she tried hard never to do, but it really seemed appropriate now. What was the next step?

She had to turn and kick a rock when she realised what the answer was: There was no other way. She would have to leave the cave, find the entrance, retrace their steps, and then track her friends like prey. “Goddammit, Lyla,” she snapped aloud, and it bounced from wall to wall several times. Hearing the slightly shrill quality of her own voice, four or five times over, had the effect of calming Calista by making her lip twitch. Soon she was giggling at herself.

She wanted to travel with people? Well, this was what happened. At least she could tell people about the time she travelled through Marook Caves. And then again. And then a little more.

“Come,” she said, and began to walk on. The command word had a near puppeteer effect on Angel as she had been using it consistently since they met, and the Seel appeared fascinated enough by the pair that it hopped along behind them as soon as they set off again.

She tossed a look at it over her shoulder and considered if it would be a good addition to their team. She liked its company and Angel had no further inclination towards dominating it since she had already won. Now she appeared to be taking something of a protector role, though the Seel was oblivious to it. As they headed further down the tunnel, pausing at each branch to feel for airflow, spot signs of humanity, and listen closely, they also spotted a few pokemon here and there. Calista wasn’t sure if the bright red eyes that blinked at them every now and then belonged to Sableye or to a literal ghost, but they were creeping her out.

The Seel began to bounce and arf when they passed a small hollow arch that led up to a cavern. Calista had opted not to poke her head into it because she noticed traces of a rope barrier that had once been hammered across the entrance. Whenever it had been blocked off from tours, and whatever the reason, it wouldn’t be conducive to hurrying to the exit if she stuck her head in every cavern she passed.

But the Seel seemed so excited and interested in this one entryway that she slowed her speedy walk and turned to it. To her surprise, peeking out around the corner and blinking shyly was a little Isdan Vulpix, white as snow and waving its tails from left to right as it looked at them.

“Hi,” Calista couldn’t help but say as she stepped closer. “Are you the one from earlier?” It sort of responded in the affirmative by sniffing the air instead of bolting away. Vulpix were fairly shy pokemon, she seemed to remember, who didn’t often seek out conflict. It was likely this one had made its way here from the earlier … wait.

It hadn’t been in the cavern with the Avalugg, either time. She for sure would have noticed another pokemon struggling to pass through either of those battlegrounds. Calista swallowed and took a few more steps towards it, not minding if it bolted away -- since it might lead her to where it had come from -- but the pokemon just blinked up at her, and then its tail ticked left and right curiously.

The Seel behind her bounded up with all the excitement in the world, and the Vulpix’s ears lowered, and its eyes rolled to the right, clearly nervous. Why wasn’t it running? It let out a low hum of a whimper in response to her thought, and Calista pulled out some jerky from her pocket and crept closer. It struggled in place a little, and her thought was proved correct. It looked injured.

“How did that happen, little one?” she asked it, crouching low and offering the treat. It stared at the meat and seemed to war internally over what to do. It didn’t look thin, particularly, so whatever had happened to it, it had been fine until recently. Probably right before they’d met it, it had lost its family or group, and it looked like somewhere on the journey through the caves, it had hurt its back leg. There was no visible injury, but Calista could see it was hovering and wincing; favouring the leg and avoiding moving towards or away from her.

“It’ll be alright,” she whispered, laying down the meat stick below its nose and daring to pet the top of its head. “It’s OK. I have a--” She reached into her backpack and rummaged around, grasping and finding … nothing. Just clothing, water, food. She let out a breath and instead pulled out the water and a little plastic collapsible bowl. To her slight surprise, the Vulpix drank greedily as soon as the water began to flow into the little green container. “That’s a little better,” she cooed. She could have sworn she had some more healing items, but maybe it was for the best she couldn’t find any, anyway. If she kept using them on wild pokemon she’d never see again, she could get in a real pinch if Angel got hurt.

“I’m going to pick you up so I can carry you somewhere safer,” Calista decided aloud. “Are you ready for that?”

The Vulpix mewled, probably mostly in real distress as she plucked it from the cold ground and rested it gently in her arms. A small struggle dissipated quickly when the Vulpix realised it hurt far less to keep still, and then it even rested its chin on Calista’s upper arm as she rearranged it in her arms. “There you go,” she soothed. “I’m going to take you up where the humans are. They’ll give you medicine and you’ll feel so much better. OK?” Of course, it didn’t answer. She stepped up, a large step, into the small side pocket room by the pathway to look around.

If the pokemon had wandered this way, it meant there was some connecting tunnel to the last place she’d seen her group. But the cavern was small, and the wall was pockmarked with weird bulbous holes and channels that glinted and sparkled with hidden secrets. Calista swallowed, feeling suddenly unnerved. “What’s in here?” she asked aloud. “Angel?”

The Salandit was feeling weird about the whining creature in her trainer’s arms and kept rising onto her back legs and placing her cold clawed feet on Calista’s shin, tongue flicking upwards and a low hiss travelling along with it. Calista gave her leg a shake, dislodging the lizard and making her fall onto her back, squirming on the smooth rock of the cavern floor.

“Angel, go investigate,” she whispered.

It looked as though any one of the holes gouged out from this small pocket could have been a tunnel to another part of the caves, but it also looked as though they were only really as small as a Vulpix. Calista cursed louder than she meant to, and the word shuddered through the cavern. The Salandit turned sharply behind them and let out a loud, rattling hiss until Calista wheeled around to look too.

“What? Where’s--”

She bit her tongue and her heart leapt in fright when through one of the holes in the wall floated a strange bluish rock. It turned a quick airborne pirouette, and then blinked over at them. For a moment, it made no move to show either friendliness or unfriendliness, just stared with a strange impassive interest. Calista swallowed the nerves, wondering if she should slowly head to the entrance, right beside it, and make a run for it. But it really didn’t seem hostile.

She turned all the way around to face it, and then really wished she had just bolted right away. She had been right to have a strange feeling -- as soon as the rock pokemon laid eyes on the small, trembling Vulpix in her arms, it narrowed its eyes as best it could, and began to shudder in mid-air.

“Oh, man,” she muttered. “You really irritated that Carbink, huh?” The Vulpix mewled, neither confirming nor denying it, and began to struggle again in her arms despite the leg pain. That was Calista’s first clue that this was the creature, potentially, that had been the one to hurt it. “I wonder what you did to annoy it this badly,” she muttered to her reluctant new friend. She wasn’t one to take sides without all the information.

“Hey, Mr or Mrs Carbink?” She paused. What was the correct term? Weren’t they genderless? “Would you mind if we left? We aren’t going to cause any trouble.” It was likely that this pokemon was what she’d personally refer to as ‘very wild’. That is, it wouldn’t understand a single word, and it would barely understand her tone of voice. It wasn’t mammalian in any way, so it wouldn’t be able to relate to her, especially if it had little to no experience with humans. Essentially, talking was completely pointless. It was going to react however it was going to react.

“Angel,” she said softly, urgently, though trying as hard as she could to keep her tone light and soothing for whatever good it would do her. The Salandit turned her head 180 degrees backwards on hearing her name, blinking at her trainer and then stiffening her muscles in response to how stiff Calista herself felt, and probably looked. A soft plume of smoke wisped from her nostril.

“We are walking past,” she said again, and took one step to illustrate her point. The Carbink made no noise, but when she made her second step, and Angel stayed at her heel, the rock pokemon bounced through the air and paused at the entrance to the cave, swaying left and right and taking up as much space as it could. It let out a pleasant-sounding trill, but a shudder ran through Calista. It didn’t feel pleasant at all.

“Clearly this Vulpix upset you,” she said firmly, “but we are going to leave. You already hurt it.” The Carbink made some chittering noises, and then a low hum.

In a nervous fit of desperation, Calista stomped her foot hard on the ground, careful to miss Angel, and clapped her hands at the same time, making it look like she was ready to lurch towards the pokemon. “Shoo!” she yelled. The Carbink lurched backwards, smacking its small, rocky body on the wall, and letting out a squeal. She instantly felt terrible, and hurried past it whispering apologies and clutching the Vulpix tight.

As she stepped through the archway that led back to the path, a mini explosion beside her made her freeze. A sturdy rock had been launched from the ether behind her into the wall, and debris scattered and rained down. She whipped around again, wide-eyed. The Carbink was hovering in the air, weaving a little more fervently through the air with its gaze locked on her.

SPOILER: Click to show

{Encounter Link}Carbink

It was ready to fight. But Calista really didn’t want to. Dammit.

“Ange--” she began, but she wasn’t able to get another word out. The Salandit seemed to have taken that word as permission to begin defending herself. The Salandit launched forward in a black blur and leapt into the air, spinning fast in a haze of sharp claws, and streaked them across the Carbink’s exterior.

“Dammit, Angel, no,” she hissed, backing up to press her back against a solid portion of the cavern wall. The space was only about fifty square feet; about the size of a large walk-in closet, and she didn’t want to risk another mini cave-in somewhere like this, with no real escape. She hadn’t wanted to fight at all, but the Carbink had taken what looked like zero damage from the Scratch and was vibrating with the energy of summoning another Rock Throw.

The cramped space would mean that she, and Vulpix, were in danger of getting hit. And she didn’t think it was going to let them run now. So she decided to lean into it. “Angel, Smog!” Fire might just glance off the gemlike body of the foe; she wasn’t sure. Poison was iffy too, as she wasn’t entirely sure if it breathed or was at all organic in makeup, but it was the first thing that came to her, and it was probably better than Scratch.

In the atmosphere around its form, sharp, craggy objects formed out of glittering aura energy, and then swivelled so that their pointiest edges pointed at Angel. Then released, shooting towards her with surprising speed. “Out of the way!” she cried.

But Angel was already midway through pouring noxious gases from her nose and mouth, concentrating hard on isolating the right emissions and directing them forward instead of behind her at the Vulpix, Calista, and the Seel who peeked around her ankles at the battle.

The gases surrounded and panicked the Carbink just as Angel was pelted by the sharp edges of the rocks and stones, which rapidly faded from sight, leaving her scratched and angered, teeth bared. The Carbink, surprisingly, didn’t look any better off at all. Angel really was improving after all. She let out an angry hiss noise, and darted left and right as she waited for her new command.

“Dragon Rage,” Calista ordered, feeling suddenly confident. “Then follow up with your strongest Ember!”

The Carbink made absolutely no move at all. It glinted brightly for a short moment, then let out a gentle hum and wavered in the air, its gems winking and glowing on and off. Was it doing something, or just messing around? Calista narrowed her eyes as the blue-green draconic flames engulfed it entirely … and when they faded, the pokemon looked like it hadn’t even noticed them.

“What?” she whispered. Was it really such a weak move? “Angel--” she began, but the Salandit was already following through on its next order, and orange flames exploded from the pit of her stomach, smoke curling from her nose. Calista turned and shielded the Vulpix from the sudden, violent heat, and the Seel even squealed in surprise at the attack. But when she turned around … it looked again like absolutely nothing had happened.

The Carbink let out a delighted trill and twisted 360 degrees in the air before gaining momentum and slamming into Angel’s chin the moment she closed her mouth and ended the torrent of small flames.

The lizard shook it off quickly, but remained angry and confused that she wasn’t dominating. Calista felt disappointment on her pokemon’s behalf -- if that had been a grass type, she was sure it would be on the ground unmoving by now. But maybe all this pushing and losing was making Angel stronger than she would have been otherwise.

Without waiting for an order this time, Angel spat crackling flames out of pure rage, and backed up the wall, shuffling upwards butt-first and flicking her tongue and tail in unison. This time, when the Carbink launched a volley of sharpened rocks, she sidled smoothly into one of the small holes covering the width of the cavern wall. The rocks collided with varying destruction on the wall, missing the lizard, and causing sediment and dust to rain from the ceiling. Calista nervously pressed her back harder against the wall, ready to recall Angel to her pokeball at a moment’s notice, and run.

A hissing, smouldering spray of purple gases licked the air from the tiny hole the lizard hid in, and Calista wondered why she was hotboxing herself with poisonous fumes -- was that something Salandit liked to do? She really had a lot of reading to do about her partner…

But then more gas appeared. This time it was pale and almost a sickly pale pink in colour, and it curled out further, almost like long ghostly fingers pushing past the dark poisonous fog and stretching, reaching for the Carbink like the scent of a cartoon apple pie … beckoning. Silently, Calista watched, confused; unnerved. The Carbink paused as it sped through the air, clearly trying to come up with some sort of a tactic. It tilted its whole body left and right as if trying to identify the mixture of scents.

And then, as if led by something it couldn’t control, it swept through the air and carefully tried to push its way inside the poisoned hole in the cavern wall…

The Poison Gas filled the pokemon, somehow, until inside and out it was filled with the deadly stuff. It shuddered, viscerally, and then jerked away as if released from whatever hold had it. Calista realised she had just witnessed something really intensely primal and predatory from her Salandit -- a behaviour that it probably had programmed deep down inside, passed down through genetic memory. A foolproof way to hunt, and kill. She filed the tactic away for a future use.

“Amazing, Angel,” she began to say. “Now--”

But the lizard wasn’t interested in listening. It launched out of the hole, eyes flashing with hunger, and caught onto the side of the Carbink. She was roughly several inches smaller, but many pounds lighter. Her Scratches did nothing but scrape and graze and make awful noises that made Calista’s teeth hurt. “Stop!” she commanded, but in the panic of watching her pokemon cling to a floating rock crystal, she couldn’t think of anything better to suggest. “That’s not working!”

The Carbink, shivering with deeply inhaled poison and the insanity of a poisonous predator clinging to its body and slicing with all its might, over and over, span around in rapid circles, firing rocks fully and half-formed from the air around it. They missed Angel, coming into being inches from her body and shooting outwards, hammering on the walls, into the creepy holes, and missing a screaming Calista by mere inches, not once, not twice … She tried to scramble out of the cavern, losing her footing and nearly stamping on Seel, and backing away when debris rained down over the archway.

“Stop!” she cried desperately again. “Stop it!” But even if the pokemon could have understood her, it was suffering from the panicked tunnel vision of a cornered creature.

The Vulpix in her arms trembled and opened its mouth wide, letting out the most terrifying squeal through tiny, glinting fangs, but no one noticed. The Seel ran and hid in the passageway, but Calista didn’t think she could leave until Angel was back in her ball. She fumbled for it, ready to return her and flee. The orange light engulfed the fruitlessly slashing black lizard, and in her rage Angel tried to flee the sucking of her own energy into the capsule. It had the bizarre effect of elongating her body by several inches before she was sucked into the ball with a high-pitched ‘shyoomp’.

The Carbink, eyes wide and body shuddering and convulsing in a way that rock absolutely should not have been able to do, rounded itself on Calista, and advanced, eyes locked on her and the Vulpix.

“Nya!” the tiny ice fox yawned, and Calista backed up again, ball shoved in her pocket, staring right back at the strange bunny-eared rock. It shuddered again, a full-bodied rejection of the bad things inside its body. The bundle of fuzz in her arms began to shiver too, and she felt almost a magnetic repulsion between the Vulpix and her arms around it, as if a tiny storm had erupted in its core and wind was pushing out in all directions.

A freezing sensation began on her stomach, chest, arms, and only expanded. She sucked in a breath of suddenly ice cold air and resisted dropping the pokemon with all her might. “What are you doing?” she demanded. Ice chips in tiny balls, like hail, swirled around her, hitting Calista in the face so that she pushed the Vulpix out at arm’s length like a bomb and closed her eyes tight. “Everyone, just … stop!” she screamed at the top of her lungs.

Just then, the ice swirling around the Vulpix increased tenfold and pushed outward with improbable force. The Carbink was caught in the middle of it, loudly buffeted by swirling hail -- the same hail that was slicing at Calista’s face as she firmly kept her eyes and mouth shut -- and then swirled through the air, hitting the rock wall and then the ground.

The hailstorm passed, and Calista slowly, painfully, opened her eyes and put the Vulpix down so she could recover her frostbitten fingers for a moment, shivering and chattering and feeling one hundred tiny cuts on her arms and cheeks, though they were numb for now.

“What was that,” she tried to say, but her lips were blue and shivering with cold.

SPOILER: Click to show

{Summary}Angel uses Scratch! 22 vs 58
Carbink uses Rock Throw It’s super effective. 20 vs 40.
Angel uses Smog. 64 vs 58.
Carbink uses Harden.
Angel uses Dragon Rage. [0]
Carbink uses Sharpen.
Angel uses Ember. It’s not very effective. 64 vs 58.
Carbink uses Tackle. 20 vs 32.
Carbink uses Rock Throw. Angel avoids the attack.
Angel uses Poison Gas.
Angel uses Sweet Scent.
Carbink is poisoned!
Angel uses Scratch.
Carbink uses Rock Throw.
Angel is returned! Angel forfeits the match.
Vulpix activates its Snow Warning.
Vulpix uses Freeze-Dry!
Carbink is knocked out.

*

Since there was no imminent danger of a new cave in, Calista took the next hour to start a campfire with lighter and kindling. It would only last less than half an hour longer with the tiny quick burn log she had, but she fully warmed up, and even the ice type seemed to enjoy warming its sore back leg beside it. Calista continued to side-eye the pokemon every so often, just in case it went off like a tiny nuclear ice bomb again, but it seemed happy enough and even managed a twenty minute nap with its chin on its tails.

Angel curled up so closely that the flames licked at her skin. Occasionally she would happily snort dark smog from her nostrils and squirm into a comfier position. The Carbink had long since regained consciousness and fled through one of the holes. Either it was hiding there, which was fine with her because she was confident they could defeat it as many more times as it took, or it had zoomed away through the same secret system the Vulpix had entered through.

She had put together a story. The Vulpix had encountered her friends, then escaped through a small passageway. On exiting, it had irritated or offended the Carbink, who had probably attacked it as a warning. The Vulpix, younger and weaker than the pokemon had likely expected, had been injured pretty badly and trapped in the cavern until Calista had luckily made her way past. The Vulpix had probably even pulled itself out of hiding to mewl at her, remembering her from feeding it earlier. She was glad it had come together.

She hadn’t realised how hungry they all were until they had eaten full meals and she still felt her stomach growl. Stress and constant travelling would do that to her. She leaned back, sipping on water, and keeping her eye on the holey wall. “It doesn’t feel that safe here,” she conceded, and began to smother the fire. Angel kept putting her little clawed hand on Calista’s, as if to say, ‘Stop, ok,’ but it just made her giggle as she continued to snuff it out.

“Let’s keep going. Can you walk, or do you need to be carried?” Calista stifled a yawn. They must have been travelling for several hours. It was hard to sense time down here, but it must have been well past two in the morning, and she had woken up early. But there didn’t feel like the time, opportunity, or safety to take a break longer than the hour to rest her feet she had just had.

She scooped up the Vulpix and headed out to the passageway, feeling a shudder when she recalled the pockmarked walls of the small, cramped room. For some reason, recalling it creeped her out more than being inside it had done. There was something creepy about a cluster of bulbous holes and embedded glittering geodes like warts. Luckily, the rest of the passageway had no similar areas. That must have been created by Carbink, and they were either hiding from the fight or had temporarily or permanently moved on. It didn’t matter which.

The next turn led her into a large passageway blocked by several rope barriers, and some large signs brightly lit by neon wall sconces. The signs depicted some of the history of the caves: the pokemon who lived here peacefully, the various early expeditions to search for any natural resources, the failed attempts to create roads through the mountains. It was an interesting read, and she felt safe in this clearly tourist-ready cavern. There were even signs and lights clearly leading from passage to passage. The one she had arrived from was clearly blocked off and marked that way.

Feeling confident she was headed the right way now, Calista climbed up onto a rocky perch with a lip that partially concealed her, and lay down her bedroll. Her eyes were watering from the constant yawning, and she knew she would begin to make stupid mistakes if she carried on walking. A half-hour nap, even, would perk her up. Caves were not by any means a natural area for her, but the basic rules of the wilderness were the same. The perch seemed safe, and the three pokemon accompanying her seemed to feel the same. Angel curled up tight by her feet, Vulpix by her chest, and Seel lay out straight behind her, keeping her almost as warm as a blanket would have. She didn’t even have the wherewithal to pull out a sheet to cover her before she fell fast asleep.

“Are you alright? Hey. Hey!”

Calista cracked open an eye. Where was she? Who was she? What had happened yesterday -- and what was a yesterday?

Humanity’s and her own history came flooding back to her in a rush that she always theorised exhausted her each and every morning. The strain of remembering one was alive. She sat up, looked around, and the first thing she saw was a Seel asleep on its back on a cold stone floor. Then the other two pokemon cracked their eyes open and looked up at her, bleary. They had fallen asleep.

Calista looked up at the man and blinked hard at him. She had been much more tired than she had thought. A man? She sat up straighter and widened her eyes. “Uh…” she said, feeling immediately under threat. Her hand went to her belt, but there was no weapon there. She had decided not to keep a weapon to hand; that was something her family did. Not her.

“Don’t be afraid,” the man said. He was thin, with a fair ponytail and a goatee beard. He wore brown hiking clothes, thick and useful, and he squatted in a fluid motion so that his legs stuck out sideways, froglike. He blinked at her, and she noticed his lids were heavy as if he was uncaring or high on something, but it was most likely that was just what he looked like. “My name is James.”

“Uh…” she said again. Reality was still trickling through her body as her brain woke up from an unsatisfying but deep nap. “Why?” The question didn’t make sense, but he seemed to understand it.

“You looked, well, dead,” he said simply, raising his heavy-lidded blue eyes to hers and looking utterly defeated by the idea. But that was probably just his normal face. “I just had to be a good Samaritan and come and ask you if you were.”

“If I were…”

“Dead,” he repeated, monotone. “Are you injured?”

She swallowed, her mouth painfully dry. Her throat and nose were achingly cold. “Lost,” she admitted. “Less lost than before, so I rested. I must have fallen asleep.”

“It’s so cold to fall asleep,” he told her, and she tried to unpick his strange wording rather than internalise what he was saying. “Hmm,” he voiced, emphasising his concern.

She sat up and leaned against a rock. “Are you?” she asked. “Lost, I mean?”

James remained in the uncomfortable looking frog squat, and looked like he was pondering the question on a philosophical level. “Yes,” he said. “I was looking for someone here.”

“I’m looking for people too. Have you seen anyone at all?”

Finally, he rearranged his long, slender limbs, packing them up and laying them out as carefully as if they weren’t a part of his body, until he also leaned against the rock lip and looked at the wall, contemplating. “Yes, I must have. I was a part of a tour group. I thought it an interesting way to pass the time. I am passing through to Cascadia City to end a long travel.” Not a long journey. He looked as though he picked his words carefully and didn’t mind if they weren’t the ordinary ones. Like the people he spoke to should pay attention to each and every word he spoke and think about them individually instead of each sentence as a whole. She already felt quite drained, mentally, by their very short conversation.

“A travel,” she repeated. But what about the people he had seen?

“I go from city to city sometimes. I’m a teacher. But my home in every way is Cascadia.”

“A teacher?” She felt like she was just repeating every word to learn more information. She had played a very old computer game like that once. Every time an NPC said something, you had to type in a word to try to further the conversation. At first, it had felt like a breakthrough of a game. But then it had quickly become clear that she had no idea what she was doing, and repeating random words back to people to try desperately to gain more information had involved more luck and patience than skill and creativity.

“I teach literature,” he said, plucking the words carefully from some unseen place and threading them together. She felt her wooziness lift, but still some part of her was being stifled and unsettled by several of his mannerisms. “I try to open people’s minds about the things they previously thought were unimportant. To do that, to teach communication in such a novel way -- no pun intended -- is no easy feat. Even teenagers believe they have everything all figured out. And to teach literature is like teaching them they don’t know how to read. How to listen. How to understand their own language.”

Calista, without really thinking, pulled the waking Vulpix into her lap. It shifted uncomfortably until its injured limbs felt comfortable, and then it rested its chin on her thigh and let its eyelids droop. “I guess I know what you mean,” she said, still unsure whether or not she cared. “They think they already understand how to read, and they do, but only on a surface level.”

“Yes. Linguistics is mostly learned naturally,” he said. “You can teach linguistics, of course, but you’re just giving life to a concept already deeply rooted in a person. Teaching somebody about subtext is like teaching somebody about the fourth dimension. They see the first three all around them so plainly, and the fourth has been there all along. They understand a dot; they can conceptualise a line; they can see with their own eyes a cube. But sometimes they don’t consider whether an instantaneous cube ever truly exists within our world. It doesn’t matter whether it does or it doesn’t, but it’s a thought process that might not occur to everybody.”

Calista let her eyes close for a moment, and then open again. “That’s from The Time Machine.”

“You’ve read it?”

“Just the first chapter. A few times, at different times in my life. I remember I couldn’t understand that concept. Of the instantaneous cube not really existing. I kept getting frustrated and putting it down again.”

The literature teacher frowned at her, the first expression of his she had seen that didn’t seem like it came with his face already. But it wasn’t of irritation; it was interest.

“Are you lost too?” she asked.

“I strayed from my tourgroup,” he said grimly, as if that answered her question.

“So the fourth dimension is time,” she explained to herself.

“The first three dimensions are all different aspects of space,” he said. “No one ever argues that they are all necessary to the creation of a cube. But if a cube never existed for any length of time at all, it never existed. That’s why time is just as important a dimension to any object you see around you as space.”

She shook her head. “I don’t understand. I didn’t when Wells said it, and I don’t when you say it. An instantaneous cube. I don’t understand.” Her eyes were closed again, but James didn’t seem to like it when she fell asleep.

“What don’t you understand about it? Just wake up and think about it.”

She adjusted herself, annoyed that he kept telling her what to do. “Why?”

“Why?” he repeated. “How are you supposed to get anywhere in life if you don’t understand a simple concept like subtext, like meaning, like time?”

“No one’s ever said that to me before.” She felt more annoyed with every passing second. He wouldn’t stop talking, and she was really tired.

“Tell me your interpretation,” he kept saying. “That’s all I want. Just open your eyes and talk to me. I haven’t talked to anyone in so long.”

“I’ll tell you if you tell me where my friends are,” she said.

“Your friends, with the glasses and the hair?”

She nodded. That sounded like them.

“They left a while ago now. They thought about you for some time, but then they stopped. It happens. They think about you, and one day it’s the last time.”

She opened her eyes, and for a moment she didn’t see him, but there he was. “Did that happen to my family?”

James Harwood leaned right in and she could feel his breath, cold and like soured meat, against her face. “Your family will never stop looking for you.”

Calista, against all odds, must have fallen back to sleep, because when she blinked hard and opened her eyes, it was the Vulpix frantically licking her face. Its raspy tongue was horribly cold, and she scrambled up to her feet, swaying violently. There was a stale, crispy scent in the air that was hard to explain, and Harwood was nowhere to be seen.

How did she know his surname?

Her head was pounding so hard she had to lean forward and fight off nausea before fumbling with numb, uncoordinated fingers to find painkillers in her pocket. “The air…” she muttered to herself, vision swimming. There was something wrong with the air. “Out,” she said hoarsely, and then louder when the Seel and Salandit didn’t immediately hop to it. “Out!”

The Vulpix wrapped in her arms, and the other two nervously, sluggishly, at her feet, Calista staggered from the blocked off cavern and followed the arrows backwards until the air began to smell sweeter. She had attended a lecture at a university to see if she wanted to attend it. The lecturer had been tall, slim, and she was almost certain his name had been…

“Callie!” She heard the screams just as her eyes began to adjust to the light. A group of people, several with miner’s lights on their helmets, stood around talking as she clambered slowly down from a higher level and landed unsteadily, injured Vulpix still in her arms. Angel nudged the uncertain Seel down onto the ground as it tried to figure out an easy way. It landed with a splat, and Angel hopped on top of it.

“I had the weirdest damn dream,” Calista said as Lyla fully sprinted up to her from the sweet-smelling entrance to the caves and wrapped her arms around her and Vulpix.

“You’re alright, oh my lord, I am so sorry. This is all my fault. All my fault.”

“Don’t stray from your tour group,” Calista joked, and then remembered that it meant nothing. She swallowed. “I’m going to sit down and have some water.” She sat down on the rock and allowed some of the men to shine lights at her eyes and even take her blood pressure. “I was only gone for like two hours,” she protested, trying and failing to open up her canteen until Elliot grabbed it and did it for her.

“Eight,” he corrected. She blinked at him. He raised his eyebrows at her. “Eight.”

She opened and closed her mouth pointlessly a few times, and then lifted her bottle and drank the cold water until it was all gone. “Wow.” She looked at Vulpix, and began to see more clearly. “I think you saved me, but I can’t figure out what happened, exactly.” The little pokemon waggled its tails and mewled.

Lyla was arguing with the men -- who were they? -- and Calista focused her attention instead on making sure all the pokemon were alright. Elliot squeezed her hand and was clearly trying to keep her talking.

“... air quality, and they were going to spend days sweeping all the passageways looking for you, but they were just in the middle of warning us to expect the worst …”

Calista leaned her head on his shoulder, and Vulpix lapped at the water from the bowl she had prepared for it, and then let out a low rumbling growl when a helmet-wearing man came up to inspect it.

“This is wild?” he asked Calista, flinching away from the pokemon as it flashed needle teeth at him. Calista rested her hand on the fox’s back.

“No,” she said, “this Vulpix is my friend.”

Elliot took over, seeing how tired she was. “Thank you, but we need to head to town now. You’ve been helpful. I really appreciate how quickly you all arrived.”

“The Seel?” the man continued, ignoring him. “Is that wild?”

She didn’t know why he was asking these questions, and it made her uncomfortable. What was he going to do to them?

“He’s going to release them back into the caves,” Elliot leaned into her ear and murmured. “Do you want him to do that?”

Calista looked up and saw Lyla laughing despite her pale, exhausted features as the Seel bounced around, trying its best to entertain her. She remembered how it had slept next to her, keeping her warm while she was likely unconscious. She remembered how the Vulpix had urgently licked her awake with its icy tongue.

“These pokemon are all ours,” she told the man, and nodded at Lyla. “The Seel belongs to my beautiful friend, and the Vulpix is mine.”

Lyla overheard, turning away from the Seel’s display and raising her eyebrows. “It’s … mine?” she asked. The men seemed to reluctantly accept that there was nothing more to be done, and headed out together with bundles of tools and ropes to make sure all dangerous passageways were properly blocked off again.

“Yeah, Ly,” Calista said, scratching the Vulpix behind the ears absently until the little pokemon’s uninjured back leg began to pound delightedly on the rock beneath it. “If you have a ball. What do you think, Seel? You want to go back in the caves?” She pointed behind them into the tunnels. “Or you want to come with us and get into scrapes and eat jerky and play with Angel?”

The Seel may or may not have understood, but it arfed, clapped, and sprinted up to Angel, slapping the lizard on the rump and zooming out of the cavern entrance, skidding to a halt and bouncing back the way it had come. Full zoomies. Eventually, Angel joined in the game of Tag, either out of sheer irritation, or for fun; Calista couldn’t tell. Vulpix wriggled in her lap, barking at them as if it wanted to join in.

“Here.” Calista dug through her backpack for several minutes before she finally recovered her final Potion. She carefully applied it to the pokemon’s Carbink-related injuries, and smoothed down its sticking up fur. “Go play.”

The Vulpix tested out its leg, and then hopped carefully off her lap and began to race around with the other two pokemon. Lyla wooped and clapped, leaping out of the way every time the Seel wasn’t able to stop its skidding in time.

When the pokemon had finished … whatever they were doing … Lyla pulled out a pink ball and enlarged it in her hand. “Seel,” she cooed. The blubbery white pokemon turned and stuck out its tongue happily at her, panting from exertion. “Come with me. If Calista is really sure?” She turned to the other girl, who gave her a thumbs up.

“I think you two will get along great,” she said. They were both bubbly, happy, confident and sociable. She could see them together as a great fit. And she was hoping to keep the Vulpix with her -- she didn’t need both of them. But this way, she didn’t have to say goodbye to the sweet Seel who’d stuck by her through this whole--

Eight hours?!

The pink ball flew and bopped the Seel on the head. Before it became energy, it rolled onto its back and wiggled from side to side, tongue still lolling. The ball shook once … twice … three times. Then, click.

Calista realised her mouth was open. “Wow, I guess it really did want to come with us,” she said. “I tried it earlier and it just burst out again.”

Lyla smiled nervously. “Please, I don’t … I really think you should…”

Calista swatted her hand away. “I want you to have it. Unless it gets too much for you…” Now they were both playing Kindness Chicken.

“Oh, c’mon,” Elliot said playfully, and released Negi as Lyla released the Seel. The Farfetch’d fluttered his wings and hopped to and fro as the Seel introduced itself the way Seels did. With a bounce and a happy half-bark.

To Calista’s surprise, the Vulpix finished playing and, still tired, walked back to sit on her boot, curling its tails around. She felt the swirl of nerves in her stomach, and pulled out a ball. Just a plain, boring pokeball compared to Lyla’s cute Love Balls -- the reality of her having that to hand really just confirmed Calista’s theory that she wanted a pokemon -- but it would hopefully be enough this time.

“Come with me, Vulpix, and we’ll help each other out for as long as we can,” she said softly, and touched the side of its flank with the ball. It crackled noiselessly with pure energy, swirled, and then whooshed inside the ball; an image Calista wondered if she would ever get fully used to.

The ball wobbled and shook on the palm of her hand, and Calista nervously set it on the ground, unsure of the etiquette. She realised, embarrassed, that every creature and human in the entrance of the caves was staring at the ball along with her, hoping the Vulpix would make the decision to join Calista. After she had just given away the capture of the Seel, it would be so awkward if Vulpix escaped and ran away.

Also, she had used her last healing item on it.

It shuddered, rolled, knocking against the rocky wall, and Calista winced, unable to look away and unable to look directly at it.

Then, with a beautifully musical ping, the light dimmed and it stopped moving.

She shot to her feet. “No way!” she cried, and snatched up Angel and jumped up and down. The fire type’s head bobbed impassively as Calista danced around. But Seel joined in, bouncing and clapping. Negi hooted and quacked, overexcited by whatever had just happened.

“You guys did it!” Elliot shouted, jumping around with her. Then Lyla wasted no time joining in too.

They danced around in the entrance to the caves, with no one else around, despite how many calories it was wasting. Calista didn’t care. This was the happiest she could remember being in forever. She released the Vupix and gave it a kiss on the forehead while it struggled and whined until it got comfy in her arms.

“Nicknames,” she announced breathlessly.

“I was thinking … Delilah,” Lyla said, squatting and rubbing her Seel’s tummy. “Lyla and Delilah. Isn’t that cute?”

Elliot and Calista exchanged a look and then looked back at her. “No,” they said. “That’s super weird,” Elliot finished. Lyla’s face scrunched up.

“You’re right, you know. I’ll keep thinking. Something cute and fun and bubbly just like Seel. This will take me a while. Do you have ideas?”

Calista looked at the Vulpix. “None yet,” she said. In him was a reminder that she should try not to stray too far from friends. He had likely saved her from death; just a wandering creature that had flitted into her life, and saved it. And then there was that terrifying explosion of power from out of nowhere. He would become a deadly and useful part of her team, if only she could learn to harness it.

“Well, was that enough caves for anyone else?” she asked, stretching and heading for the path outside.

“Yes,” Lyla said firmly, following behind. “It’s five star hotels and first class train journeys for us from now on.” Calista smiled. She knew it wasn’t true, but that was ok. She was becoming more and more confident in the team around her; not just in herself alone.

“To the Gym!” Elliot reminded them, playfully shooing them quicker down the road. He side eyed Calista. “And maybe the hospital, just a little bit! Let’s gooo.” She laughed and upped the pace. After everything, the safety of a town did sound pretty good.



WC: 17,438

SPOILER: Click to show

{Notes}1. The Seel has been caught by an NPC, meaning that it is just an NPC pokemon now.

2. That summer event was really not necessarily in the swing of things, but I enjoyed it! I will accept penalties for not doing it right…

[chaosonex]

Thank you for your patience. Your topic has been evaluated!

RP said:

• Arrive at Marook Caves
• Get Lost
• Get Attacked
• Defeat Seel (+12 Exp to Angel)
• Attempt to Capture Seel (-1 Pokeball)
• Heal Pokemon and Seel (-2 Potions)
• Discover more Avaluggs
• Meet Vulpix Again
• Heal Vulpix (-Potion)
• Battle Carbink
• Angel is Defeated
• Vulpix steps in
• Gave Seel to Lyla
• Capture Vulpix (-1 Pokeball)
• The Journey continues

Topic said:

• Oof, big mood
• Aww
• I love that Seel
• I want that Avalugg
• Stranger Danger!
• I really love that Seel
• You'll get special pokeballs!
• Awww!

Topic Evaluation
NAME TAT: Seeing the Sights 10AP Making Friends 11 AP To be the Best 6 AP Nursing 10 AP TLC 5 AP Dedication 5 AP	Topic: 12 EXP Evaluation: 68 EXP Total: 68 EXP	Dians: 4775	Bonuses: Long Duration Big Smack Star Posts Penalties: n/a

SPOILER: Click to show {Evaluation Wrap-Up}Super sorry about the long wait here! The start of this was your weakest point. I understand you're aiming for it to be full of friction, but it actually made it hard to get into the topic and I had to restart several times to make sure I didn't miss anything. Things like this are always difficult, and it really hurt the quality of the overall topic. It got better later though, and you really are good at incorperating ideas and encounters. I would say to watch that your descriptions aren't too wordy. The cave with the ramp could have used a shorter, more vague to description to keep the pace going.  All in all though, this was almost a 4 star topic. You're a practiced writer, and it shows. Keep up the good work and I hope to see more soon!

 You got an EGG MOVE VOUCHER x1!

You also received a SUMMER 019 EXP 30% (2/3)! The first use has been applied to this topic.

Note: Bonuses/Penalties have already been calculated into your rewards!