Fighting 3.4: Cognitive Test
Meredith
[09:18:40]
It’s not even the afternoon and you’re already tired. You’re always tired. Doesn’t help that you spent the last week at the edge of Route 2 in ad hoc ten-hour shifts, paranoid that every non-existent shadow held an Ultra Beast. You didn’t even get paid for it. It was “volunteer work” that should look great on grad program apps that can get you off this alien-infested archipelago.
In the meantime, you need money to pay rent, utilities, food, student fees, and pokémon upkeep. VStar is at least promising to pay you better than waitressing. Even if you wanted to keep doing that the restaurant’s closed until everything goes back to normal. And apparently Congress made it so that the government can delay paying unemployment during the apocalypse, but landlords can still charge rent.
The VStar job doesn’t look too bad, either. There’s a kid who wants a Class V. You help her do that. She gets one and you get a nice payday. Still pays over minimum wage in the meantime. Sure, you’re not exactly thrilled to work for the pokémon capture-and-export trade (and your professors would throw a fit if they knew you were A Bad Person), but getting a kid their Class V isn’t bad for the native birds since none of them even need one. Can’t see the harm in it.
Wolsey lights the way beside you, every flap of her wings sending embers scattering behind her. Most fade quickly. There’s little risk of lighting fires while walking down an abandoned street in the middle of the rainy season. (This damn island has an entire season of rain.)
The Pokémon Center has guards positioned around it. No uniforms or anything. Just individual trainers like you, pokémon at their sides. Some don’t even seem that strong. You ask Wolsey to stay outside and help them for the time being. She’s a strong battler and she can cast some light. Also gives her more time out of her ball. She doesn’t get to spend much time breathing real air when you’re stuck in your apartment night in and night out. Too much risk of her burning down the place.
Inkay drift through the air of the lobby. Their light disappears quickly yet still illuminates about a fifth of the room. One floats over to you when you enter. It’s weird watching them constrict and expand like they’re moving through water. Is that necessary? Psychological? You smile at the inkay once it is close enough to let you see the ground beneath you. A quick glance around the lobby shows the nurse and an obviously male teenager illuminated. Maybe your student isn’t here. Or maybe she prefers to rest in darkness.
“Cuicatl Ichtaca?” You do your best to ignore how badly you probably just mangled the name.
“Here,” she answers, about ten feet away. The inkay starts ‘swimming’ in her direction and you follow. Once you can finally see her you can tell why she was sitting in darkness. There’s a telltale white cane beside her. When the inkay’s a little closer you can see the cataracts in her eyes. She has dark skin and jade hair. Her garishly colored t-shirt has a hydreigon and a one-word slogan on it. Makes her look younger than she probably is.
More interesting are the two pokémon around her. There’s a vulpix on her lap, quietly judging you. A beldum floats above her shoulder. Ah. So that’s why she wants a five.
You sit down and smile, more for your own sanity than anything. “Hello, Cuicatl…”
“Cui-cat. L’s silent” she says. Slowly and deliberately. So you don’t screw up the pronunciation in the future.
Poor kid. You probably will anyway.
“Hi, Cuicatl, I’m Meredith. I’m studying ornithology at U-Alola. VStar set me up to be your teacher?”
She almost certainly already knows all that but you aren’t sure where else to start.
“That’s bird science?” she asks.
Not what you were anticipating but, sure, you can roll with it. “Yes.”
“Oh.” She frowns. “I have a tyrunt. Birds are close.”
Metagross and a tyrantrum.
Sure, why not? Probably not the right reaction, but, again, you’re too tired for fright or concern or whatever.
“So, you got two ‘mons with Class V evos without getting the license first?”
“Well,” her frown deepens. “The tyrunt was a gift. And I won’t evolve Nocitlālin twice.”
The kid has at least a little sense. That’s good. Wouldn’t want her to get killed by her own metagross after you went and helped her evolve it. You’d feel guilty for a little bit, even if it was her own damn fault. Not that tyrantrum is that much better. Probably. You watched half a documentary on them once before falling asleep.
“I see. And you want the license to keep the tyrunt?”
“Yes.” Her mouth stays open a second longer before she snaps it shut. Something else, then. Probably none of your concern.
“Alright. Do you know how the licensing process works?” She shakes her head. “For a Class IV you’ve got to get me or someone else with a Class V to vouch for you, tell the government that you won’t do anything really, dangerously stupid. You mess up, we both get punished.” There are other ways to get a four as well, but vouching is by far the easiest. Plus, it doesn’t seem like she needs the four itself as much as she needs it as a stepping-stone to five.
“For the Five, you’ve got to get a majority of the Class V-holders on the islands to vote to give you one. You’ll have to get their respect. That might be hard for you.” Certainly was for you, and you were just native and female. Both of those, from America’s old nemesis, and blind? You don’t envy her. “You’ll probably have to give them some research they’ll find useful. I did mine on sensu oricorio.”
You concluded that there was no ethical way to train one, but, hey, if you really wanted to try, ethics be damned, here’s how you would go about it. The researchers were fascinated by the husbandry parts and the battlers were grateful that you put a new toy in their chest. “Research on the trail can be hard, though. You might want to suspend your challenge.”
She shakes her head. “Can’t. Challenge Visa.”
Maybe she could apply for an academic one… but you aren’t even sure if that would work. And even if it was legal, she’d still have to get it through ICE in this administration. You’re honestly surprised she got a Challenge Visa in the first place given all the talk about closing the border. Unless she isn’t here legally. You’ll need to figure that out before she goes for the license, but it seems rude to ask right now.
“I guess you could type it out on the trail if you had to. You’d need a waterproof computer. And, um, you can type, right?”
“I can speak. Then the computer types for me.” She pauses. “I don’t have a computer. Or enough money to get one.”
Text-to-speech isn’t great. At all. You’ve tried sending text messages with it before and, well, you’ve always had to go back and type it yourself, along with a clarification that, no, you didn’t mean ducking. And if she doesn’t have computer money… “How are you going to feed a tyrantrum?”
“I’ll figure it out later. Wild pokémon, maybe? It’s legal to hunt gumshoos. And she won’t get to full size soon.”
That’s a lot of gumshoos. And the revived tyrantrum are notorious divas. Might not like eating rodents all day every day. You don’t have to tell her that point blank. Don’t want to. Best case scenario is that you lead her on for a while and make some money before she accepts reality on her own. Or, better yet, she gets the five, you get paid, and then she decides that caring for a tyrantrum while broke is a terrible idea. You can barely afford normal birds.
“Okay.” Time to move on. Learn more about her now. There will be time enough to think of the future later. “Any idea what you could research?”
“I speak Lower and Upper Draconic,” she says. “I could translate some of the myths.”
“Draconic? Like…”
“Dragon language.” You open your mouth but can’t find an intelligent response. “Although I’m told I’m not very good at Upper Draconic. Better at Lower, but that has a lot of dialects. I’ve met druddigon and charizard and they talked different than hydreigon. Growls were longer, sometimes there were hisses when I would’ve expected a snort. I sort of got what they were saying and I think they understood me.” She tilts her head and a small smile replaces her frown. “I am very good at hydreigon’s dialect. And I can mostly understand tyrunt.” A frown again. She crosses her legs, earning a yowl of protest from her vulpix. “I think. I did not understand much of Jurassic Park the book, big words and the recording was fast, but I think it said that really smart pokémon might not know their language and culture when they came back. That’s why the pyroclaptors went bad. And tyrantrum are dragons, and dragons are smart. Maybe I should teach her dragon myths?”
You’re aware of work on parrot and corvid languages, helped along by some of those pokémon being bilingual themselves. But dragons? Hydreigon? You didn’t know anyone had bothered to try. Yet what interests you the most is none of those things.
“Dragon myths? As in, myths about dragons? Quetzlcoatl and stuff.”
She shakes her head and strands of hair fall onto her face. “No. Dragons have their own myths. Alice talked about The Split God, Reshiram and Zekrom. And Kyurem, sort of. Then Quetzlcoatl…or Rayquaza…they call him…” What she says is some sequence of growls that somehow still sounds like language. “He let dragons fly. Oh, and there’s the first dragon. Or the earth dragon. Groudon. In Anahuac we have to offer him a lot of blood so he doesn’t wake up and kill all the humans. But the dragons like him.”
Oh, cool. She really believes in her country’s murder cult. Whatever. You can work with monsters as long as you’re getting paid.
“Then there’s…” the name is a hiss, a strange growl thing that you’re pretty sure comes from her mouth more than her throat, and another hiss. It sounds sort of like a reptile trying to say ‘Sagaris.’ “But Sagaris isn’t a god. More of a hero. Like… I’m sorry. I don’t know any local heroes. Ohserase? She’s Unovan but…”
A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
“I know the story.” You’re a kanaka girl born under American rule. You’ve heard it. Your high school even put on the play before you got your GED and hit the trail. You always thought it was a silly story: if you just pray to the gods and politely ask the government to care about the people, it will all come to pass. But life isn’t a fairy tale. Shit happens, people die, gods and kings can’t even be bothered to pay their serfs unemployment.
A glance to the side shows the teenage boy staring at you (or Cuicatl, hard to tell). Maybe you should move this conversation. She’s more interesting than you were expecting. “Want to come to my apartment?” you ask. “We can talk more there.”
She starts to stand and her vulpix jumps to the side, letting out a high-pitched whine as she does. Cuicatl’s hand falls to her cane before she collapses it and stows it on her belt. “Can you guide me?”
“Sure.”
Her hand’s a little cool. You grab it but she slides it up to your elbow and rises to her feet. Oh. Yeah, that is a little less awkward. She uses her free hand to withdraw her vulpix. The beldum trails after her, just above and behind her shoulder.
You meet up Wolsey on the way out, preening and pointedly ignoring a baile oricorio’s mating dance. Good girl. At your whistle she flaps up into the air and lights the way back home.
“I suppose I should say more about myself. I’m a third-year student at U-Alola.” Did you already say that? “I help run cognitive tests on birds. Puzzles, occasional speech mimicry. Wolsey here knows some words.”
“Hello,” Wolsey dutifully adds.
“It’s odd to hear about pokémon with religions. Testing them all day, they’re smart, sure, but not like that. Not human.” Honchkrow are smart, sure, but smart like a toddler. Maybe Ophelia is on adult human level. Maybe. Even then you’re never sure how much is her intelligence and how much is from her borrowed spirits.
Cuicatl frowns and turns towards Wolsey. “Do you have myths?” The firebird warbles something. “Stories about gods. Ancestors. The start of the earth.” Cuicatl gets a much happier warble. “Can you tell me? In your own words.” The firebird goes into a long song about… something. Cuicatl nods attentively at times and urges her to go on during breaks. Once you’re almost back to the apartment she thanks Wolsey and turns to you. “She does. A giant bird with one wing made of a rainbow and the other made of ash gave talonflame their fire.” She pauses and purses her lips. “It’s kind of similar to the Split God myth. Just with the Fire Bird.”
“Do, uh, birds also speak dragon? Sorry if that’s dumb but—”
{I’m psychic. I can understand most pokémon.}
“Ah.” The head of the Phantom Studies department is as well, but you aren’t sure if he’s ever paid a visit to the ornithology wing. He’s usually busy with… Mr. Mime? One of the psychic-types that tells biology to go fuck itself. Anyway, explains how she learned draconic. You’d kind of just thought that was a thing over in Anahuac, and it might be because that place is an information black hole, but this makes more sense.
You have to withdraw Wosley in the apartment. Then getting up the stairs in the dark is a pain in the ass you don’t really talk much. She seems to manage just fine. Probably all old hat for her. It’s only when you’re right outside the door that you realize something you probably should’ve figured out at the very beginning if you weren’t exhausted: it was a terrible idea to bring Cuicatl to your apartment.
It’s fine. This is fine. You can just smooth things over with Ophelia before letting her in. “Can you stay outside for a bit? My sister hates surprises and I want her to know you’re coming in.”
She grunts her acceptance (you really need to tell her not to do that in front of Ophelia) and you slip inside. Your sister appears in the corner, faintly illuminated by pale blue will-o-wisps. “Welcome home, Meredith. You are back sooner than expected.”
You curtsy, unsure if she can even see it. “Hello, Eve. The Pokémon Center was not a good place to talk. I invited her over for tea. Would you like tea?”
She grimaces but nods. “So long as she’s polite.”
“She’s blind and not from here. Can you give her a little grace? Please?”
Eve sighs and looks so very, very concerned. She never used to look like that.
“Perhaps.”
That’s as close to a ‘yes’ as you’re going to get from her.
You go back out and prepare to brief Cuicatl. “She says you can come in. Just be on your best behavior. Full sentences, curtsies, no nicknames, no interruptions. Nothing out of line.”
Maybe she nods, maybe she doesn’t. Or maybe she doesn’t react at all for a long while. “Okay. Is your sister…”
Alright? Bent in the head? An asshole? Definitely not, depends on how you see it, yes but don’t tell her that.
“Some bad stuff happened to her a while back. She hurt her head. Maybe don’t talk about the island challenge?”
That’s all a very polite way of saying that she got hit by a boulder a buzzwole had aimed at one of Selene’s pokémon. The incineroar dodged, of course, because it was very well trained. The champion said she was very, very sorry for ‘the accident’ but mostly she just looked too exhausted to fully care. It took you a long time, but you understand that now. Can’t even blame her.
“I’ll try.”
“Oh. Final thing? Can you—” She’s blind. Obviously, she can’t dance. “Sing?”
“I had classes. I did well in them.” There’s a hint of pride in her voice. Probably good enough.
“Alright. My sister likes music.”
Fuck it, you’re blocking the hall and Ophelia might be impatient. You open the door again, fumble for Cuicatl’s arm for a bit in the dark, and then bring her into the room. Your sister looks up as you enter and looks on expectantly. Yeah, you’re the mutual connection, you should give introductions.
You curtsy again. “Hello, Eve. This is Cuicatl Ichtaca, my student. Cuicatl Ichtaca,” please don’t correct the pronunciation please don’t correct the pronunciation hey I know you’re psychic please don’t correct the pronunciation, “This is Eve, my sister.”
She curtsies and Eve relaxes a little. Can she even see it?
“A pleasure to meet you, Miss Ichtaca.”
You take that as a sign to guide Cuicatl forward to the table. She sits down well enough. Eve’s expressionless. Good enough. “Sister, can you help me prepare the tea? Perhaps Cuicatl can sing to us in the meantime?”
Both get the hint. Eve follows you with sure footing, cold blue flames trailing after her. Cuicatl starts a song. It’s strange hearing her speak (or sing, as it were) in her own language. Very different sounds. Come to think of it her accent’s pretty good for someone who just got here recently. And she is a good singer. Probably not too much in the way of formal training, but a nice voice. And the song’s structure almost sounds like the oricorio songs that you set out to study years ago.
Back then you just wanted to preserve the old songs and dances and maybe relearn some of the old ones. The journey went fine. You did what you set out to do. Beat six trials and came close to beating Nanu on Poni. Pretty good, all things considered.
If you could have you would have given Eve some of your luck. Even if it meant a journey fifty times harder.
You come back with three cups of tea and one of nectar. The nectar is sat in front of Ophelia’s seat. The sensu oricorio is perched in the corner, preening in the dim light. Eve wordlessly nods when you place the cup down in front of her chair. Your sister can’t drink tea anymore but still wants to feel included.
Once you sit down and press a cup into Cuicatl’s hands she stops singing. “What was the song about?” Eve asks.
“A princess meeting her lover in the night.” Cuicatl takes a sip. “It is an old song.”
Eve’s face literally and figuratively lights up at the word ‘princess’ and damn it for a second she really does look like herself. “Perhaps you can teach me, sometime?”
Cuicatl nods. “I do not know how long I will be in the city. Maybe the next time I’m here?”
“I would like that.”
So far, so good. Leading with song was definitely the right way to go about it.
{Your sister is very… faint,} Cuicatl says. In your mind. {Is she a dark bloodline?}
{Something like that.}
{Okay.}
And that’s the end of that. Cool. You don’t like explaining it if you don’t have to. Not in front of Eve and Ophelia, at least.
“Meredith, you have a Class V license, right?”
“I do.”
“Why did you get yours?”
“All the money in ornithology these days is in hawlucha care.”
The shadows on Cuicatl’s face seem to grow darker.
That was the wrong answer.
You should have known it was the wrong answer.
“What wars did you fight in, then? How did it feel when the tlatoani gifted you your hawlucha?”
Eve’s expression is no less severe than Cuicatl’s, but she says nothing for now. Your pleading look is ignored.
“Cuicatl—”
“What were your captives’ names, Meredith? Where did you grow up in Anahuac?”
“Back in the 80s the king,” or whatever he’s called, “gave some to America.”
“And he stopped being tlatoani when he did. The birds belong to Huitzilopochtli. Do you know what the crime is for stealing one?”
Yeah. The State Department sent you a whole brochure on it. You were looking at San Antonio for grad school but, hey, you might get kidnapped, dragged across the border in the dead of night, and publicly executed so Castelia started looking pretty good in comparison. Lot harder to kidnap you from there.
“I know. It’s not ideal. But I need the money to get off the island and—”
A male voice starts roaring in Nahuatl, right next to you. To Cuicatl. “Ophelia, please stop.” She does, sort of, dropping the voice to a whisper. And Cuicatl’s gone still beside you, eyes wide and every muscle tensed up like she’s just heard a ghost.
Which, to be fair, she has.
You grab her hand, partially yank her up, and mostly drag her out the door. The whisper doesn’t stop completely until you’re a block away from the building. Fuck. Fuck. It was going so well then you ran your damn mouth and you never told her why she needed to be formal, hell, girl probably thought she was just making veiled threats at you in front of your autistic sister, and why the hell do you train channeler birds in the first place, dumbass?
Well, your potential paycheck vanished. Might as well not be soulless about it. You bring Cuicatl to a bench and let her sit and lean into you and sob for a bit because, damn it, Ophelia, what did you do?
She stops crying eventually and just leans into you and you have an armed wrapped around her like you didn’t kind of just maybe torture her and still have a right to comfort her. “Your sister is a ghost-speaker?” she finally asks.
“No. My oricorio is. I’m sorry. I should’ve told you that she’s… like that. Sometimes. I thought if you were just formal enough and sang—”
“I’m useless. I know.”
“You’re not. My fault. I’m sorry.”
She snort-sobs and gets some more snot on your shirt that you’re going to ignore. “My brother told me. I knew he must’ve hated me but hearing him say it was—” She breaks up and starts crying again.
Oh. Her brother. That’s. Yeah. You understand that. More than you want to. When Eve…
“It wasn’t him. Oricorio can just use the voices of the dead to speak. It’s… it’s a lot. I know. Trust me. But it wasn’t him, whatever it sounded like.”
She doesn’t answer you. Wolsey does. Sort of. It seems like a song or maybe a story. It doesn’t seem to help and eventually he stops altogether.
“’m fine.” Cuicatl says. Eventually. “I’ll have Nocitlālin take me back to the Center.”
“Noci—”
The beldum zooms into the light and towards its trainer. Oh. How long was it hovering around?
“You sure? It’s not really—”
“Yes.” She holds out her hand and the beldum slips into it. “Goodbye.”
*
The door opens and you step through. Your sister is in the corner, Ophelia perched in front of her. They look proud, almost. “You’re welcome,” Eve says.
“For what?”
“She won’t threaten you again.”
“And she won’t teach you her song, either.”
There’s a flash of pain in her eyes and for once you can’t tell who it’s coming from.
“You’re safe,” she whispers. “That’s what matters.”
This is hopeless. You’ll sleep and then get back to this in the afternoon once she’s calmed down a bit. Or maybe you won’t. The kid was making death threats, even if she couldn’t or wouldn’t act on them. Is this the hill you want your sanity to die on? This wasn’t the first time she tortured someone with the voices of the dead. Won’t be the last. Might as well not be you.
Eve cuts you off before you can open the bedroom door.
“You said you’re leaving.”
Right. Shit. Yeah. That’s what you get for having people over when you’re tired.
“I’ll take you. Don’t worry about it.”
Pale fire ripples across her body. “Where are you going to?”
“Florida? Unova? Alaska? Don’t know. Somewhere that doesn’t feel like an alien-infested graveyard.”
You close the bedroom door behind you without looking at her face. It’s rude and Ophelia will have words with you when you wake up, but now you just need to sleep. Or try. Truth is, you’re not a good person. You thought you were once. Might have been. Because a good person would’ve accepted the message in your thesis, that there isn’t an ethical way to raise a bird that terrorizes people with the ghosts of dead relatives. Except you’re willing to sit back and let a bunch of terrible shit happen to someone else if it means you get to see Eve’s face in the morning.
No. You’re a bad person and you know it. Most of the time you just wish you were even worse. The kind of monster who could look a sobbing girl in the eyes and feel nothing. Because monsters aren’t hounded by guilt at night.
A real monster wouldn’t be so damn tired all the time.